Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (The Neapolitan Novels, #3)

by Elena Ferrante

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.

Maybe, I thought, by acting as if my money belonged to her she wants to convince me that I myself belong to her, and that, even if I get married, I will belong to her forever.

Suddenly Nadia, who was right opposite her, began to vibrate like a window loose in its frame, and dissolved.

With her, there was no way to feel that things were settled; every fixed point of our relationship sooner or later turned out to be provisional; something shifted in her head that unbalanced her and unbalanced me. I couldn’t understand if those words were in fact intended to apologize to me, or if she was lying, concealing feelings that she had no intention of confiding to me, or if she was aiming at a final farewell.

I realized then that she wasn’t capable of thinking that she was her self and I was my self; it seemed to her inconceivable that I could have a pregnancy different from hers, and a different feeling about children.

she seemed ready to consider any possible joy I found in motherhood a betrayal.

the thread is broken, that fluency of yours that had a positive effect on me is gone, now I’m truly alone.

behind every discipline is the penis and when the penis feels impotent it resorts to the iron bar, the police, the prisons, the army, the concentration camps; and if you don’t submit, if, rather, you continue to turn everything upside down, then comes slaughter.

I had to accept myself outside of her.

appeared willing to love me only provided that I continually demonstrate my nothingness.

My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her.

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.

“The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.”

Maybe, I thought, I’ve given too much weight to the cultivated use of reason, to good reading, to well controlled language, to political affiliation; 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.