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In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.
Am I always this furious other I? I, here in Naples, in this filthy house, I, who if I could would kill this man, plunge a knife into his heart with all my strength? Should I restrain this shadow—my mother, all our female ancestors—or should I let her go? I shouted, I hit him. And at first he warded off the
nothing lasts, Lenù, even here in my belly, you think the creature will endure but it won’t. You remember when I married Stefano and I wanted the neighborhood to start again from the beginning, to be only beautiful things, the ugliness of before was not supposed to be there anymore. How long did it last? 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. Gennaro makes me feel guilty, this thing here in my belly is
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Lila on the other hand—it seemed clear to me now, and it made me proud, it calmed me, touched me—struggled to feel stable. She couldn’t, she didn’t believe it. However much she had always dominated all of us and had imposed and was still imposing a way of being, on pain of her resentment and her fury, she perceived herself as a liquid and all her efforts were, in the end, directed only at containing herself. When, in spite of her defensive manipulation of persons and things, the liquid prevailed, Lila lost Lila, chaos seemed the only truth, and she—so active, so courageous—erased herself and,
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What was the body of a woman: I had nourished my daughter in the womb, now that she was out she was nourished by my breast. I thought, there was a moment when I, too, had been in my mother’s womb, had sucked at her breast.
I’m old and no one should disturb me when I sleep.” “Go to a doctor.” “Enough with doctors.” “I’ll go with you, those are problems that can be solved.” She became serious. “No, I’m fine like this.” “No one is fine like this.” “I am. Fucking is very overrated.”
Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them.
In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed.
They attribute their well-being and their success to their father. But I—I who did not have privileges—am the foundation of their privileges.
