Elena Ferrante

She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood around her. Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn. Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away. A few evenings earlier, something had happened that had really scared her. Marcello had left, the television was off, the house was empty, Rino was out, her parents were going to bed. She was alone in the kitchen washing the dishes and was tired, really without energy, when there was an explosion. She had turned suddenly and realized that the big copper pot had exploded. Like that, by itself. It was hanging on the nail where it normally hung, but in the middle there was a large hole and the rim was lifted and twisted and the pot itself was all deformed, as if it could no longer maintain its appearance as a pot. Her mother had hurried in in her nightgown and blamed her for dropping it and ruining it. But a copper pot, even if you drop it, doesn't break and doesn't become misshapen like that. "It's this sort of thing," Lila concluded, "that frightens me. More than Marcello, more than anyone. And I feel that I have to find a solution, otherwise, everything, one thing after another, will break, everything, everything.

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won__. . . . I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child. . . . True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known. . . .

Don't be timid. You're a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present.

To cause pain was a disease. As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs.

Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.

I soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn't excite me, only what Lila touched became important.

...maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.

What a complex foamy mixture a couple is. Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn't die, it doesn't want to die.

The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand.

Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote.

Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.

The most difficult achievement is the capacity to see oneself, to name oneself, to imagine oneself. If in daily life we use ideologies, common sense, religion, even literature itself to disguise our experiences and make them presentable, in fiction it__ possible to sweep away all the veils__n fact, perhaps, it__ a duty.

Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity.

But one afternoon Lila said softly that there was nothing that could eliminate the conflict between the rich and the poor. "Why?""Those who are on the bottom always want to be on top, those who are on top want to stay on top, and one way or another they always reach the point where they're kicking and spitting at each other.""That's exactly why problems should be resolved before violence breaks out.""And how? Putting everyone on top, putting everyone on the bottom?""Finding a point of equilibrium between the classes.""A point where? Those from the bottom meet those from the top in the middle?""Let's say yes.""And those on top will be willing to go down? And those on the bottom will give up on going any higher?""If people work to solve all problems well, yes. You're not convinced?""No. The classes aren't playing cards, they're fighting, and it's a fight to the death.

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won__. . . . I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child. . . . True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known. . . . Besides, isn__ it true that promotion is expensive? I will be the least expensive author of the publishing house. I__l spare you even my presence.

Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.

A woman's body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect's poison injected into a vein.

Perhaps Lila was right: my book__ven though it was having so much success__eally was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn__ been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.