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

by Elena Ferrante

How is it that Nino is here, and what is here, what is is?

“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.”

I wanted to tell him: I followed your advice, I kept going, here’s a draft, tell me what you think.

I jus saw a tik tok that said if a man likes u he criticizes u but thus is shat tbey meab

In other words I couldn’t rely on Pietro, he looked at me without seeing me.

“You ended up attributing to her capacities that are only yours.”

They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object.

a few crumbs had even mutated into tips for my father and had contributed to allowing me an education. What therefore was the threshold beyond which bad money became good and vice versa?

Didn’t even his coming to my and Pietro’s house resemble Lila’s taking him to the house where she and Stefano lived? Were we not doing but redoing?

anyway I don’t want to talk about Lina.” “Why?”

Really clocking to me how nuerktic she is

“Pietro, let’s try to be clear: to your many maladies do you want to add jealousy, too?”

Ever since I was a child I had constructed for myself a perfect self-repressive mechanism. Not one of my true desires had ever prevailed, I had always found a way of channeling every yearning. Now enough, I said to myself, let it all explode, me first of all.

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.

“You’re throwing away everything you are for Nino? You’re ruining your family for him? You know what will happen to you? He’ll use you, he’ll suck your blood, he’ll take away your will to live and abandon you. Why did you study so much? What fucking use has it been for me to imagine that you would enjoy a wonderful life for me, too? I was wrong, you’re a fool.”

I thought: Something great is happening that will dissolve the old way of living entirely and I’m part of that dissolution.