Elena Ferrante Quotes

#1. But I was bored, I could scarcely understand them. I started to borrow novels from the circulating library, and read one after the other. But in the long run they didn't help. They presented intense lives, profound conversations, a phantom reality more appealing than my real life. So, in order to feel as if I were not real, I sometimes went ... #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#2. Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#3. One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#4. The problem is that real change takes a long time, while life hits us right away, now, with all its contradictions. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#5. The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#6. Then she added a sentence I will always remember: "the beauty of mind Cerullo had from childhood never found an outlet, Greco, it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and will be as if she never had it. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#7. As I traveled toward Milan, I discovered that, with Lila set aside, I didn't know how to give myself substance except by modeling myself on Nino. I was incapable of being a model for myself. Without him I no longer had a nucleus from which to expand outside the neighborhood and through the world, I was a pile of debris. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#8. Maybe I should tell her that things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. It's a good sentence, she'll like it. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#9. It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn't even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#10. She was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#11. Accept that to be adult is to disappear, is to learn to hide to the point of vanishing? #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#12. I'll give you treasure chests full of gold pieces, I know the value of spending time with you." I #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#13. I gave in continuously, with painful pleasure, to waves of unhappiness. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#14. If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#15. As for the other neighbors, they had been on vacation for a while already or had left Friday afternoon for a weekend in the mountains, at the sea. The three of us, too, would have been settled at least a month earlier at some seaside vacation place, as we were every year, if Mario hadn't left. The lech. Empty building, August was like that. I felt like guffawing at every door, sticking out my tongue, thumbing my nose. I didn't give a shit about them. Happy little families, good money from professions, comfort constructed by selling at a high price services that should be free. Like Mario, who allowed us to live well by selling his ideas, his intelligence, the persuasive tones of his voice when he taught. Ilaria called to me from the landing:
"I don't want to stay with the vomit stink. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#16. Males always have something pathetic about them, at every age. A fragile arrogance, a frightened audacity. I no longer know, today, if they ever aroused in me love or only an affectionate sympathy for their weaknesses. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#17. In hyperbolic tones he listed the catastrophes that in his view were approaching: one, the decline of the revolutionary subject par excellence, the working class; two, the definitive dispersion of the political patrimony of socialists and Communists, who were already perverted by their daily quarrel over which was playing the role of capital's crutch; three, the end of every hypothesis of change, what was there was there and we would have to adapt to it. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#18. Lies are better than tranquilizers. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#19. To carry out any project to which you attach your own name you have to love yourself. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#20. 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. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#21. I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#22. In fiction we say and recognize things about ourselves, which, for the sake of propriety, we ignore or don't talk about in reality. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#23. How lovely the months, the years with him had been. At the moment I hadn't understood their importance, and now here I was, growing sad. The rain the cold the snow the scents of Spring along the Arno and on the flowering streets of the city, the warmth we gave each other. Choosing a dress, glasses. His pleasure in changing me. And Paris, the exciting trip to a foreign country, the cafes, the politics, the literature, the revolution that would soon arrive, even though the working class was becoming integrated. And him. His room at night. His body. All finished. I tossed nervously in my bed unable to sleep. I'm lying to myself , I thought. Had it really been so wonderful ? I knew very well that at that time, too, there had been shame. And uneasiness, and humiliation, and disgust: accept, submit force yourself. Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to rigorous examination #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#24. I felt like a drop of rain in a spiderweb, and I was careful not to slide down. We #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#25. Move on another plane in the name of one's own difference. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#26. I'm laughing, I apologized, at the situation, at you, who've wanted to kill Nino forever, and at me, who if he showed up now would say to you: Yes, kill him. I'm laughing out of despair, because I've never been so offended, because I feel humiliated in a way that I don't know if you can imagine, because at this moment I'm so ill that I think I'm fainting. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#27. Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#28. I devoted myself to the house, to the children, to Pietro. Not once did I think of having Clelia back or of replacing her with someone else. Again, I took on everything, and certainly I did it to put myself in a stupor. But it happened without effort, without bitterness, as if I had suddenly discovered that this was the right way of spending one's life, and a part of me whispered: Enough of those silly notions in your head. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#29. As long as one writes only for oneself, writing is a free act by means of which, to use an oxymoron, one secretly opens oneself. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#30. I don't want to accept an idea of life where the success of the self is measured by the success of the written page. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#31. I simply decided once and for all to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#32. Today I know what I felt, but then I didn't understand. At that instant I had only an unpleasant impression, as if he had given the signal and from then on all I could do was to sink by degrees into repugnance. In reality I felt above all a blaze of hatred toward myself, because I was there, because I had no excuses, because it was I who had decided to come, because it seemed to me that I could not retreat. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#33. At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#34. The dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#35. I there first felt the impact of time, the force that was pushing me toward forty, the velocity with which life was consumed, the concreteness of the exposure to death: If it's happening to her, I thought, there's no escape, it will happen to me as well. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#36. It wasn't innocent blood. To my father nothing about Amalia ever seemed innocent. He, so furious, so bitter and yet so eager for pleasure, so irascible and so egotistical, couldn't bear that she had a friendly, at times even joyful, relationship with the world. He recognized in it a trace of betrayal. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#37. In my spare time I didn't go out, I sat and read novels I got from the library: Grazia Deledda, Pirandello, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#38. So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#39. But when do people ever speak truthfully and when do things ever happen unexpectedly? You know better than me that it's all a fraud and one thing follows another and then another. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#40. But the condition of wife had enclosed her in a sort of glass container, like a sailboat sailing with sails unfurled in an inaccessible place, without the sea. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#41. I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#42. You still waste time with those things, Lenu? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Do you want to see the string of pearls that Stefano gave me? #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#43. What a waste it would be, I said to myself, to ruin our story by leaving too much space for ill feelings: ill feelings are inevitable, but the essential thing is to keep them in check. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#44. Useless labor, that I feared would stay in my mind, extending into me, into everything. On the occasion of both funerals I made plans ahead of time to visit Pasquale. In those years I did that whenever I could. In prison he had studied a lot, had received his high school diploma, and, recently, a #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#45. The 'right reading' is an invention of academics and critics. Every reader gets from the book he is reading nothing else but his book. The shelves where we line up the volumes we've read are deceptive. We have available there only titles, covers, pages. But the books we've truly read are phantoms conjured up by reading with no rules. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#46. Someone who takes love away from us devastates the cultural structure we've worked on all our lives, deprives us of that sort of Eden that until that moment had made us appear innocent and lovable. Human beings give the worst of themselves when their cultural clothes are torn off, and they find themselves facing the nakedness of their bodies, they feel the shame of them. In a certain sense the loss of love is the common experience closest to the myth of the expulsion from the earthly paradise: it's the violent end of the illusion of having a heavenly body, it's the discovery of one's own dispensability and perishability. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#47. If you don't try, nothing ever changes. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#48. No, to produce ideas you don't have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#49. What a fuss for a name: famous or not, it's only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#50. The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#51. I went to Lila's house in search of comfort. But I knew I had made a mistake with her, too. I had done something stupid: I hadn't told her about going with Stefano to get the photograph. Why had I been silent? Was I pleased with the role of peacemaker that her husband had proposed and did I think I could exercise it better by being silent about the visit to the Rettifilo? Had I been afraid of betraying Stefano's confidence and as a result, without realizing it, betrayed her? I didn't know. Certainly it hadn't been a real decision: rather, an uncertainty that first became a feigned carelessness, then the conviction that not having said right away what had happened made remedying the situation complicated and perhaps vain. How easy it was to do wrong. I sought excuses that might seem convincing to her, but I wasn't able to make them even to myself. I sensed that the foundations of my behavior were flawed, I was silent. On #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#52. You're really a good girl, poor you. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#53. A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#54. They were just like the relations from whom I had fled as a girl. I couldn't bear them and yet they held me tight, I had them all inside me. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#55. That the human condition was so obviously exposed to the blind fury of chance that to trust in a God, a Jesus, the Holy Spirit - this last a completely superfluous entity, it was there only to make up a trinity, notoriously nobler than the mere binomial father-son - was the same thing as collecting trading cards while the city burns in the fires of hell. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#56. We gazed at the constellations, praising the portentous architecture of the sky with trite formulas. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#57. 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. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#58. I couldn't calm down. Was it possible that Mario should leave me like this, without warning? It seemed to me incredible that all of a sudden he had become uninterested in my life, like a plant watered for years that is abruptly allowed to die of drought. I couldn't conceive that he had unilaterally decided that he no longer owed me any attention. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#59. It's only and always the two of us who are involved, she who wants me to give her what nature and circumstances kept, I who can't give what she demands; she who gets angry at my inadequacy and out of spite wants to reduce me to nothing, as she has done with herself, I who have written for months and months to give her a form whose boundaries won't dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn, calm myself. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#60. I had the impression that, although I was absorbing much of that sight, many things, too many, were scattering around me without letting me grasp them. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#61. But the happy ending has to do with the tricks of the narrative, not with life, or even love, which is an uncontrollable, changeable feeling, with nasty surprises that are alien to the happy ending. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#62. He said we lived in a provincial country, where every occasion was an opportunity for complaining, but meanwhile no one rolled up his sleeves and reorganized things, trying to make them function. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#63. Who says I'm vain?" "The comparison: your friend isn't. But I'm sorry for her, vanity is a resource. If you're vain you pay attention to yourself and your affairs. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#64. She never said a word to me of anger or discontent. She began instead to go around with Carmela Peluso, the daughter of the carpenter-gambler, as if I were no longer enough. Within a few days we became a trio, in which, however, I, who had been first in school, was almost always the third. They talked and joked continuously with each other, or, rather, Lila talked and joked, Carmela listened and was amused. When we went for a walk between the church and the stradone, Lila was always in the middle and the two of us on the sides. If I noticed that she tended to be closer to Carmela I suffered and wanted to go home. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#65. There are people who leave and people who know how to be left. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#66. In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#67. Maybe there's something mistaken in this desire men have to instruct us; I was young at the time, and I didn't realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn't like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn't want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman. And today when he no longer senses me as part of himself, he feels betrayed. I #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#68. It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#69. I pretended to be interested in their secret undertaking, but in fact I was very sorry about it. Although the two siblings had involved me by choosing me as their confidant, it was still an experience that I could enter only as witness: on that path Lila would do great things by herself, I was excluded. But above all, how, after our intense conversations about love and poetry, could she walk me to the door, as she was doing, far more absorbed in the atmosphere of excitement around a shoe? ... What did I care about shoes. I still had, in my mind's eye, the most secret stages of that affair of violated trust, passion, poetry that became a book, and it was as if she and I had read a novel together, as if we had seen, there in the back of the shop and not in the parish hall on Sunday, a dramatic film. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#70. A book should push the reader to confront himself and the world #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#71. you have to get your hands dirty if you want to change things. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#72. My work stops at publication. If the books don't contain in themselves their reasons for being - questions and answers - it means I was wrong to have them published. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#73. To write, you have to want something to survive you. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#74. You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#75. I soon discovered that I was getting used to being happy and unhappy at the same time, as if that were the new, inevitable law of my life. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#76. I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#77. Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#78. Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school? Or had she brought me back in such a hurry so that I would avoid punishment? Or - I wonder today - did she want at different moments both things? #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#79. 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. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#80. I reshuffled the cards that by now we knew well enough. I spoke of the before and the after, of the old generation and of ours, of how we were different, of how she and Stefano were different. And this last argument made a breach, seduced her, I returned to it passionately. She listened to me in silence, evidently she wanted to be helped to compose herself, and slowly she did. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#81. Words: with them you can do and undo as you please. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#82. And yet now that we were seventeen the substance of time itself no longer seemed fluid but had assumed a gluelike consistency and churned around us like a yellow cream in a confectioner's machine. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#83. But then, in Piazza di Carbonara, from stones she moved on to weapons, and it became the place where men fought to the last drop of blood. Beggars and gentlemen and princes hurried to see people killing each other in revenge. When some handsome youth fell, pierced by a blade beaten on the anvil of death, immediately beggars, bourgeois citizens, kings and queens offered applause that rose to the stars. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#84. The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#85. Because what is the face, what finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise, rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#86. She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#87. I recognized in them what I had never had and, I now knew, would always lack. What was it? I wasn't able to say precisely: the training, perhaps, to feel that the questions of the world were deeply connected to me; the capacity to feel them as crucial and not purely as information to display at an exam; a mental conformation that didn't reduce everything to my own individual battle, to the effort to be successful. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#88. Why would anyone be interested in my little personal story if we can do without Homer's or Shakespeare's? Someone who truly loves literature is like a person of faith. The believer knows very well that there is nothing at all at the bureau of vital statistics about the Jesus that truly counts for him. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#89. I began to weep with loneliness. What was I, who was I? I felt pretty again, my pimples were gone, the sun and the sea had made me slimmer, and yet the person I liked and whom I wished to be liked by showed no interest in me. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#90. I had long since realized that each of us organizes memory as it suits him, I'm still surprised when I do it myself. But it surprised me that one could go so far as to give the facts an arrangement that went against one's own interests. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#91. Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#92. Beautiful everywhere, outside and in, male fantasies. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#93. The waves rolled in like blue metal tubes carrying an egg white of foam on their peaks, then broke in a thousand glittering splinters and came up to the street with an oh of wonder and fear from those watching. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#94. When I opened my eyes again, five hours later, at seven o'clock on Saturday August 4th, I had trouble getting my bearings. The hardest day of the ordeal of my abandonment was about to begin, but I didn't know it yet. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#95. I doubt that work ennobles man and I am absolutely certain that it does not ennoble woman. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#96. Everything is interesting if you know how to work on it. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#97. The frantumaglia is an unstable landscape, an infinite aerial or aquatic mass of debris that appears to the I, brutally, as its true and unique inner self. The frantumaglia is the storehouse of time without the orderliness of a history, a story. The frantumaglia is an effect of the sense of loss, when we're sure that everything that seems to us stable, lasting, an anchor for our life, will soon join that landscape of debris that we seem to see. The frantumaglia is to perceive with excruciating anguish the heterogeneous crowd from which we, living, raise our voice, and the heterogeneous crowd into which it is fated to vanish. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#98. I pay attention to every system of conventions and expectations, above all literary conventions and the expectations they generate in readers. But that law-abiding side of me, sooner or later, has to face my disobedient side. And, in the end, the latter always wins. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#99. As a girl-twelve, thirteen years old-I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#100. How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they're at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function. To say : I am your history, you begin from me, listen to me, it could be useful to you. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#101. Good feelings are fragile, with me love doesn't last. Love for a man doesn't last, not even love for a child, it soon gets a hole in it. You look in the hole and you see the nebula of good intentions mixed up with the nebula of bad. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#102. What did I care anymore about his political opinions, about Pasquale and Nadia, about the death of Ulrike Meinhof, the birth of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the electoral advances of the Communist Party? The world had retreated. I felt sunk inside myself, inside my flesh, which seemed to me not only the sole dwelling possible but also the only material for which it was worthwhile to struggle. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#103. To tolerate existence, we lie, and we lie above all to ourselves. Sometimes we tell ourselves lovely tales, sometimes petty lies. Falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reflection, they dilute the horrors of our time, they even save us from ourselves. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#104. Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#105. I liked to discover connections like that, especially if they concerned Lila. I traced lines between moments and events distant from one another, I established convergences and divergences. In that period it became a daily exercise: the better off I had been in Ischia, the worse off Lila had been in the desolation of the neighborhood; the more I had suffered upon leaving the island, the happier she had become. It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of one required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#106. I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#107. Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#108. Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#109. Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause, there are the likable ones and the unlikable, the good and the bad, everything in the end consoles you. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#110. Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#111. They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#112. Maybe there's no second time without a third, but there is a first time without a second. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#113. The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn't find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as if she had never had it. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#114. I know I`m mean to tell you these things, but he is much worse than I am. He has the worst kind of meanness, that of superficiality. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#115. Naples was the great European metropolis where faith in technology, in science, in economic development, in the kindness of nature, in history that leads of necessity to improvement, in democracy, was revealed, most clearly and far in advance, to be completely without foundation. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#116. That year it seemed to me that I expanded like pizza dough. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#117. I knew - perhaps I hoped - that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#118. Finally he had decided that he had to free Lila, even if at that moment, perhaps, she had no desire to be freed. But - he had said to himself - it takes time for people to understand what's good and what's bad, and helping them means doing for them what in a particular moment of their life they aren't capable of doing. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#119. It's hard to explain why, but that regret made me suffer. It seemed to be the sign of a true interest in Lila, something much stronger than the compliments for my discipline as a constant reader. It occurred to me that if Lila had taken out just a single book a year, on that book she would have left her imprint and the teacher would have felt it the moment she returned it, which I left no mark, I embodied only the persistence with which I added volume to volume in no particular order. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#120. I listened, I understood and I didn't understand. Long ago she had threatened Marcello with the shoemaker's knife simply because he had dared to grab my wrist and break the bracelet. From that point on, I was sure that if Marcello had just brushed against her she would have killed him. But toward Stefano, now, she showed no explicit aggression. Of course, the explanation was simple: we had seen our fathers beat our mothers from childhood. We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us. As #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#121. I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#122. She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in this world. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#123. And so, in spite of his virtues, he was a frivolous, superficial man, an animal organism who dripped sweat and fluids and left behind, like the residue of a careless pleasure, living material conceived, nourished, shaped within female bellies. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#124. And my ego gladly avoids leaning out the window. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#125. At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father's shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer. They were all laughing, even Lila, with the expression of one who has a role and will play it to the utmost. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#126. Her nausea increased, the dialect had become unfamiliar, the way our wet throats bathed the words in the liquid of saliva was intolerable. A sense of repulsion had invested all the bodies in movement, their bone structure, the frenzy that shook them. How poorly made we are, she thought, how insufficient. The broad shoulders, the arms, the legs, the ears, noses, eyes, seemed to her attributes of monstrous beings who had fallen from some corner of the black sky. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#127. You can't leave me here to hope, when in reality you've already decided everything. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#128. 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. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#129. Is it possible that in all those years she left me nothing of herself, or, worse, that I didn't want to keep anything of her? It is. This #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#130. I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#131. So pleasure was this: breaking, mixing, no longer knowing what was mine and what was his. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#132. I concluded that first of all I had to understand better what I was. Investigate my nature as a woman. I had been excessive, I had striven to give myself male capacities. I thought I had to know everything, be concerned with everything. What did I care about politics, about struggles. I wanted to make a good impression on men, be at their level. At the level of what, of their reason, most unreasonable. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#133. Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#134. Women, in all fields - whether mothers or not - still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#135. A book, an article, could make noise, but ancient warriors before the battle also made noise, and if it wasn't accompanied by real force and immeasurable violence it was only theater. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#136. starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#137. She went like that saint who, although she still has her head on her shoulders, is carrying it in her hands, as if it had already been cut off. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#138. Up or down, it seemed to us that we were always going toward something terrible that had existed before us yet had always been waiting for us, just for us. When you haven't been in the world long, it's hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don't even feel the need to. 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 the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this is the night. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#139. In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#140. The conclusion we drew from this convinced us that it was best to do everything on purpose, deliberately, so that you would know what to expect. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#141. She grumbled, she said sarcastically that men place such an enormous importance on fucking, she laughed: not Marcello - although even he doesn't joke - but Michele, who went crazy, he's been obsessed with me for a long time, and even runs after the shadow of my shadow. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#142. Such tensions without sense push us to formulate questions of meaning. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#143. Once, she closed the book abruptly and said with annoyance, "That's enough." "Why?" "Because I've had it, it's always the same story: inside something small there's something even smaller that wants to leap out, and outside something large there's always someting larger that wants to keep it a prisoner. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#144. At the fourth flight Lila did something unexpected. She stopped to wait for me, and when I reached her she gave me her hand. This gesture changed everything between us forever. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#145. She was skinny, like a salted anchovy, she gave off an odor of wildness, she had a long face, narrow at the temples, framed by two bands of smooth black hair. But #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#146. One can't go on anymore, she said, electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave traces of yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#147. The title is Ulysses'
'Is it about the Odyssey?'
'No, it's about how prosaic life is today.'
'And so?'
'That's all. It says that our heads are full of nonsense. That we are flesh, blood, and bone. That one person has the same value as another. That we want only to eat, drink, fuck. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#148. She was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being all her own, that was still obscure to her. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#149. The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#150. But her body, seated a few inches from mine on the wooden bench, had manifested no unease. Not even her voice, which had been sure and clear: no. Not a single sign that might lead me to think that she was lying. Thus I had no doubt. She was lying. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#151. I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#152. 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 #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#153. We have too much stuff inside and it swells us, breaks us. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#154. It seemed that everyone was shouting too loudly and moving too quickly. This sensation was accompanied by nausea, and she had had the impression that something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around everyone and everything forever, but imperceptible, was breaking down the outlines of persons and things and revealing itself. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#155. It seemed to me - articulated in words of today - that not only did she know how to put things well but she was developing a gift that I was already familiar with: more effectively than she had as a child, she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected with energy. But I also realized, with pleasure, that, as soon as she began to do this, I felt able to do the same, and I tried and it came easily. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#156. You're really doing well, it's the satisfaction you get from school, it's love," Lila said to me, and I felt that she was a little sad. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#157. We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#158. Even if I tried to tell myself that I had given him nothing, that the children were mostly mine, that they had remained within the radius of my body, subject to my care, still I couldn't avoid thinking what aspects of his nature inevitably lay hidden in them. [ ... ] How much of him would I be forced to love forever, without even realizing it, simply by virtue of the fact that I loved them? 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. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#159. Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#160. Our world was like that, full of words that killed: croup, tetanus, typhus, gas, war, lathe, rubble, work, bombardment, bomb, tuberculosis, infection. With these words and those years I bring back the many fears that accompanied me all my life. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#161. Antonio's fixation was always the same: Sarratore's son {Nino}. He was afraid that I would talk to him, even that I would see him {at school}. Naturally, to prevent him from suffering, I concealed the fact that I ran into Nino entering school, coming out, in the corridors. Nothing particularly happened, at most we exchanged a nod of greeting and went on our way: I could have talked to my boyfriend about it without any problems if he had been a reasonable person. But Antonio was not reasonable and in truth I wasn't either. Although Nino gave me no encouragement, a mere glimpse of him left me distracted during class. His presence a few classrooms away - real, alive, better educated than the professors, and courageous, and disobedient - drained meaning from the teachers' lectures, the pages of books, the plans for marriage, the gas pump on the Stradonr. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#162. Elena Ferrante is the author of several novels. There is nothing mysterious about her, given how she manifests herself - perhaps even too much - in her own writing, the place where her creative life transpires in absolute fullness. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#163. I wrote my book to free myself from it, not to be its prisoner. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#164. It was during that journey to Via Orazio that I began to be made unhappy by my own alienness. I had grown up with those boys, I considered their behavior normal, their violent language was mine. But for six years now I had also been following daily a path that they were completely ignorant of and in the end I had confronted it brilliantly. With them I couldn't use any of what I learned every day, I had to suppress myself, in some way diminish myself. What I was in school I was there obliged to put aside or use treacherously, to intimidate them. I asked myself what I was doing in that car. They were my friends, of course, my boyfriend was there, we were going to Lila's wedding celebration. But that very celebration confirmed that Lila, the only person I still felt was essential even though our lives had diverged, no longer belonged to us and, without her, every intermediary between me and those youths, that car racing through the streets, was gone. Why then wasn't I with Alfonso, with whom I shared both origin and flight? Why, above all, hadn't I stopped to say to Nino, Stay, come to the reception, tell me when the magazine with my article's coming out, let's talk, let's dig ourselves a cave that can protect us from Pasquale's driving, from his vulgarity, from the violent tones of Carmela and Enzo, and also - yes, also - of Antonio? #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#165. The next day, at breakfast and during the entire drive to Milan, he talked passionately about what he considered the most exciting period of his life, the years between 1945 and 1948. I heard in his voice a genuine melancholy, which vanished, however, when he went on to describe with an equally genuine enthusiasm the new climate of revolution, the energy - he said - that was infusing young and old. I kept nodding yes, struck by how important it was for him to convince me that my present was in fact the return of his thrilling past. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#166. A tangle of resentments, the sense of revenge, the need to test the humiliated power of my body were burning up any residue of good sense. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#167. I feel like the knight in an ancient romance as, wrapped in his shining armor, after performing a thousand astonishing feats throughout the world, he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdues and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#168. Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories ... The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#169. When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#170. When you haven't been in the world long, it's hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don't even feel the need to. Adults, #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#171. On Napoli, Elena Ferrante is more ferocious than Roberto Savino. #Quote by Angela Paolantonio

#172. Competition between women is good only if it does not prevail; that is to say if it coexists with affinity, affection, with a real sense of being mutually indispensable, with sudden peaks of solidarity in spite of envy, jealousy and the whole inevitable cohort of bad feelings. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#173. 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, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#174. We told each other everything, even the little things, and were happy. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#175. The fictional treatment of biographical material - a treatment that for me is essential - is full of traps. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#176. 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. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#177. I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#178. People died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse, and yet, in every round of voting, gave their enthusiastic approval to the politicians who made their life unbearable. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#179. Depressed I went out into the heat that lay on the neighborhood like a hand swollen with fever in that season, and made my way to the library. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#180. Was it possible that I - short, too full-figured, wearing glasses, I diligent but not intelligent, I who pretended to be cultured, informed, when I wasn't - could have believed that he would like me even just for the length of a vacation? #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#181. If she kept him next to her she was afraid of breaking him, if she pushed him too far away she was afraid of losing him. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#182. I had never seen her naked, I was embarrassed. Today I can say that it was the embarrassment of gazing with pleasure at her body, of being the not impartial witness of her sixteen-year-old's beauty a few hours before Stefano touched her, penetrated her, disfigured her, perhaps, by making her pregnant. At the time it was just a tumultuous sensation of necessary awkwardness, a state in which you cannot avert the gaze or take away the hand without recognizing your own turmoil, without, by that retreat, declaring it, hence without coming into conflict with the undisturbed innocence of the one who is the cause of the turmoil, without expressing by that rejection the violent emotion that overwhelms you, so that it forces you to stay, to rest your gaze on the childish shoulders, on the breasts and stiffly cold nipples, on the narrow hips and the tense buttocks, on the black sex, on the long legs, on the tender knees, on the curved ankles, on the elegant feet; and to act as if it's nothing, when instead everything is there, present, in the poor dim room, amid the worn furniture, on the uneven, water-stained floor, and your heart is agitated, your veins inflamed. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#183. I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet of my mind. I can't stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, break. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#184. In other words, the cultural education of any high-school student should include an introduction to the idea that a writer adapts his writing to ever-changing expressive needs and that a higher or lower note doesn't mean that the singer has changed. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#185. The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#186. As a result of subduing the forces of nature with the tools that we invent, we find ourselves today at the point where the force of our tools has become a greater concern than the forces of nature. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#187. I felt that in me fear could not put down roots, and even the lava, the fiery stream of melting matter that I imagined inside the earthly globe, and the fear it provoked in me, settled in my mind in orderly sentences, in harmonious images, became a pavement of black stones like the streets of Naples, a pavement where I was always and no matter what the center. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#188. She was like that, she threw things off balance just to see if she could put them back in some other way. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#189. Lila appeared in my life in first grade and immediately impressed me because she was very bad. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#190. That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighbourhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swallen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts ( ... ) they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls ( ... ) They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#191. But I've always had a low voice, I can't yell, the words fall a short distance away like a handful of pebbles thrown by a child. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#192. Leave, instead. Get away for good, far from the life we've lived since birth. Settle in well-organized lands where everything really is possible. I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it's not the neighborhood that's sick, it's not Naples, it's the entire earth, it's the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#193. I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#194. Let's write one together," Lila said once, and that filled me with joy. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#195. They were complicated years. The order of the world in which we had grown up was dissolving. The old skills resulting from long study and knowledge of the correct political line suddenly seemed senseless. Anarchist, Marxist, Gramscian, Communist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, worker were quickly becoming obsolete labels or, worse, a mark of brutality. The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere. Meanwhile, by means legal and illegal, all the accounts that remained open in the state and in the revolutionary organizations were being closed with a heavy hand. One might easily end up murdered or in jail, and among the common people a stampede had begun. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#196. The depressed don't write books. People who are happy write, people who travel, are in love, and talk and talk with the conviction that, one way or another, their words always go to the right place."
"Isn't that how it is?"
No, words rarely go to the right place, and if they do, it's only for a very brief time. Otherwise they're useful for speaking nonsense, as now. Or for pretending that everything is under control. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#197. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before 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. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#198. Evidently what in the fiction of the story serves in all innocence to reach the heart of the reader becomes an abomination for one who feels the echo of the facts she has really lived. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#199. Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore 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 Grecos, the Cerullos. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#200. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. #Quote by Elena Ferrante

#201. To be haunted by my heart is no threat. #Quote by Nalini Singh

#202. I feel that working now is the way for me to learn things, whether it's languages or another activity. #Quote by Elena Roger

#203. When I glanced at the chair, it started to shake. I'd like to think it was scared of me, but I rarely invoked that response in living things, let alone inanimate objects. #Quote by Kelley Armstrong

#204. Because for Terrasen, for Erilea, Elena would walk into the eternal darkness lurking across the valley to buy them all a chance. Elena sent up a final prayer on a pillar of smoke rising from the valley floor that the unborn, faraway scions of this night, heirs to a burden that would doom or save Erilea, would forgive her for what she was about to do. #Quote by Sarah J. Maas

#205. Animals obviously ranked higher in Michaela's world view than humans. Having seen some of the things humans were capable of, Elena couldn't disagree. #Quote by Nalini Singh

#206. A knock came at the door. Everyone looked up. Elena's nostrils flared and she leaned over to whisper something to Clay.
"Fuck," he muttered. "Keep talking, Jaime. It's only Cassandra. She can wait. Forever, if we're lucky."
"I heard that, Clayton," Cassandra said as she walked in.
"Who the hell forgot to lock the door?" Clay said.
"You were the last one in," Elena murmured.
"Damn. #Quote by Kelley Armstrong

#207. Law matters, because it keeps us safe, because it protects our most fundamental rights and freedoms, and because it is the foundation of our democracy. #Quote by Elena Kagan

#208. Along with all those who left their countries for other shores, I belong in neither land. We are unmoored and disconnected, like these poplar seeds blown into the crevices of the buildings, into the corners of the world. #Quote by Elena Gorokhova

#209. The Williams sisters, they have this power. They have this ability to come back from nowhere. #Quote by Elena Vesnina

#210. And second, I will always call you Elena-mine. #Quote by Nalini Singh

#211. I always choose my projects for the script or what the director want to tell with that story. And if I like the story. #Quote by Elena Anaya

#212. He then touched my chin softly and lifted it up to look into my eyes.I felt like i was under a spell or something. His eyes were strange but beautiful,like blue crystals,so transparent I became mesmerized by the. #Quote by Elena Carpenter

#213. Never lose your heart, Elena. No matter if the world tells you it makes you weak. Immortals have so much power. It is good to have a weakness. #Quote by Nalini Singh

#214. I live to the rhythm of my country and I cannot remain on the sidelines. I want to be here. I want to be part of it. I want to be a witness. I want to walk arm in arm with it. I want to hear it more and more, to cradle it, to carry it like a medal on my chest. Activism is a constant element in my life, even though afterwards I anguish over not having written 'my own things.' Testimonial literature provides evidence of events that people would like to hide, denounces and therefore is political and part of a country in which everything remains to be done and documented. #Quote by Elena Poniatowska

#215. If I were to splay you out on my desk and thrust my fingers into you right now, I think I'd find different. #Quote by Nalini Singh

#216. He made my life hell. Him and Tonto over there." Daniel glared toward Nick. "Poor little Clay. He has problems. He's had a tough life. You should be nice to him. You should make friends with him. That's all I ever heard. All they saw was a cute little runt of a wolf cub. He bared his teeth and they
thought it was cute. He ordered us around like a miniature Napoleon and they thought it was cute. Well, it wasn't cute from where I was standing. It was - "
I held up my hand. "You're ranting."
"What?"
"Just wanted to let you know. You're ranting. It's kinda ugly. Next thing you know, you'll be laying out your plans for world domination. That's what all villains do after they rant about their motivation. I was hoping you'd be different. #Quote by Kelley Armstrong

#217. He brought the mirror carefully around the chaise, placing it where she could see herself in its shining surface. Now she guessed what he intended. It was outrageous. Surely not ...
A tremor shook her, desire mingled with panic. She rose from the seat. "No, I can't - "
As she hesitated, he caught her hands. "Yes, you can, darling. And I promise you will enjoy it. #Quote by Elena Greene

#218. A source told me that you don't do girlfriends."
"Your source was mistaken. I do my girlfriend quite frequently. #Quote by Elena Kincaid

#219. By the time they had graduated, he had fallen for Shaker Heights as well, the way Elena described it: the first planned community, the most progressive community, the perfect place for young idealists. In his own little hometown, they'd been suspicious of ideas: he'd grown up surrounded by a kind of resigned cynicism, though he'd been sure the world could be better. #Quote by Celeste Ng

#220. Xavier leaned forward. "Sarcasm aside, you don't need a guy like that, Elena. Maybe you think you do - only female werewolf and all that - but hell, I've seen what you can do - tied to a chair, up against a male werewolf. You can do that, you don't need some fucking psychopath like Clayton Danvers-"
He stopped, noticing my gaze.
"He's standing right behind me, isn't he?" Xavier muttered.
"Uh-huh."
Xaview tilted his head back, saw Clay, and disappeared. He reappeared on the opposite bench, pressed up against me. I looked over at him, eyebrow raised. He swore under his breath and teleported to the far end of the other bench. Then he stood and turned to Clay.
"You must be-"
"The fucking psychopath," Clay said.
"Er, right, but I meant that in the most respectful way. Believe me, I have the utmost regard for, uh ... "
"Raging lunatics," I said.
Xavier shot me a glare.
"Oh sit down," I said. "He didn't bring his chain saw. #Quote by Kelley Armstrong

#221. Anger is honest. Hatred is a backhanded compliment. Envy is the best gift of all. But let them turn you into a victim, and you're labelled for life.

Pity is the sea you drown in. #Quote by Elena Dunkle

#222. Now, everybody is searching for managers with a little dose of leadership (not too much but it should be clearly there). Some "bosses" say that their employees either have leadership skills or they don't, that this is an innate ability. Others think leadership can be learned and they train their employees through various courses on this topic. The main aspect to observe here is that the majority of employers do not train or want their employees to become "distinct" leaders and follow their path in the world. They want and train them to stay in their company and successfully deliver more to the company. Of course, the rule is validated by exceptions, so there are companies that give birth, from their environment and trainings, to great and very influential leaders. #Quote by Elena D. Calin

#223. I have to.
I've been fighting it all night. I'm going to lose. My battle is as futile as a woman feeling the first pangs of labor and deciding it's an inconvenient time to give birth. Nature wins out. It always does. #Quote by Kelley Armstrong

#224. The leader goes also to the less traditional networking meetings. The manager participates in networking events organized and promoted. #Quote by Elena D. Calin

#225. Jeremy had a plan for getting Clay back and I wasn't allowed to know anything about it or allowed to help him carry it out. As one might expect, I accepted this news with grace and understanding.
"That is the stupidest idea I've ever heard!" I snarled for the dozenth time that hour.
"I won't just sit here and do nothing. #Quote by Kelley Armstrong

#226. Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing. #Quote by Elena Anaya

#227. What's this?" Nick said. "Bedtime?"
No one answered him. I kept my eyes closed.
You look positively content, Clayton," Nick continued, thumping down on the floor. "That wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that Elena is cuddled up with you, is it?"
It's cold in here," I murmured.
Doesn't feel cold."
It's cold," Clay growled.
I could start a fire."
I could start one too," Clay said. "With your clothes. Before you get them off. #Quote by Kelley Armstrong

#228. Vaccination was, and is, thoroughly infused with our politics, our social values, and our cultural norms. By acknowledging and understanding the divergent reasons why we've vaccinated in the past, however, we just may ensure the continued success of vaccination in the future. #Quote by Elena Conis

#229. And what my constitutional values are are wholly irrelevant to the job, and so neither you nor anyone else will know what they are. #Quote by Elena Kagan

#230. Anna did a double take as the tall brute actually smiled. Perfect white teeth were revealed by his killer grin. #Quote by Elena Kincaid

#231. I sleep and sleep and sleep, yet I still have an unquenchable thirst for it. #Quote by Maria Elena

#232. Rescuing Elena plunged him into the nightmare world of people trafficking and sex slavery.... but as an ex-Royal Marine, he could handle it #Quote by David Zelder

#233. Tell me when you want to pick it up again."
"Tell me when Satan starts a snowball fight."
"I'll do that. Lunch? #Quote by Kelley Armstrong

#234. My voice comes from faraway, therefore it is faint and, also, because it is a woman's voice, it is trembling of the emotion imposed by your presence, as much as of the honour of being listen to. My voice comes from faraway, but it hopes when you will listen to it that it will resound in your hearts.
My voice comes from the midst of this nation, which having been placed on the threshold of Europe, will have loved and admired France and like France, and often through it, she would have strived for Freedom, vowed to have accomplished a splendid destiny and face bravely the changing mood of Fortune.

You may well recognise in these qualities Romania, land of suffering, land of enlightenment and of valour placed across the promontory against the dredge of Asian invasions and like a beacon being mightily conscious of defending the civilization, which gave it its people and its laws. - Paris, 27th April 1925; addressing the League of Nations (translated Constantin Roman #Quote by Elena Vacarescu

#235. Do they have a cream to cure Asshatism? I could finally get rid of you then." – Elena #Quote by Jessie Lane

#236. You never lose
anyone definitely #Quote by Elena Toledo

#237. If she was gone, this was it for him. He had lived over a thousand five hundred years. It was enough. If Lijuan had risen monstrous while he and Elena slept, he'd do what he could to burn out that scourge because Elena would want him to do that, but he would not live thousands of years without her. He could not live another day without her. #Quote by Nalini Singh

#238. Writers in Latin America live in a reality that is extraordinarily demanding. Surprisingly, our answer to these demands protects and develops our individuality. I feel I am not alone in trying to give their voice to those who don't have it. #Quote by Elena Poniatowska

#239. It is absolutely true that I have served in two Democratic administrations. You can tell something from me and my political views from that. #Quote by Elena Kagan

#240. Damon: Come back as a vampire and I will stake you myself cause I can't stand the idea of you hating me forever.
Elena: Witches are supposed to maintain the balance of nature. It's your duty to them. To keep this curse sealed. #Quote by L.J.Smith

#241. That was very bad of you, Elena, Raphael said once they were in the air. You know the coming sun shower will pass in but a moment.
I also know Tasha McHotpants is regretting she didn't scoop you up when you were young and single. Altering her mental tone, she said, Oh, Raphael, what luck I caught you. And me dressed up like a warrior with a sword and everything. She snorted. Luck my ass. #Quote by Nalini Singh

#242. I won't make excuses for what I did. The truth is that your whole life can change with one split-second decision, and it doesn't matter if you told yourself you'd never do it or if you stepped into the moment with no intention of doing it. All it takes is for that one second of absolute panic when the solution shines right there in front of you, and you grab it ... only to have it turn into ash in your hand. There is no excuse for what I did. #Quote by Kelley Armstrong

#243. I thought I needed to go to one of the top five schools in the nation and never even thought 'What's important to me?' Instead of figuring out what was important, which was obviously being near home, I kind of just went with what everyone thought I should do. #Quote by Elena Delle Donne

#244. It torments you to know you were misunderstood, to not have risked yourself, and to wait. #Quote by Elena Poniatowska