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

— Elena Ferrante

Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Narrator in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but–further–she left no trace of effort, you weren't aware of the artifice of the written word. I read, and I saw her, I heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I imagined would belong to conversation if one were so fortunate as to be born from the head of Zeus and not from the Greeks, the Cellos.

— Elena Ferrante

Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs.

— Elena Ferrante

...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.

— Elena Ferrante

Maybe I should tell her that things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. It’s a good sentence, she’ll like it.

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

Only when we feel the story in each of its moments or places are we able to tell it properly.

— Elena Ferrante

Perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn’t been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.

— Elena Ferrante

Religion will disappear from men's consciousness when, finally, we have constructed a world of equals, without class distinctions, and with a sound of scientific conception of society and of life

— Elena Ferrante

She, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn’t afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings.

— Elena Ferrante