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

by Elena Ferrante

certainly she felt unhappy for days but managed not to ask herself why. She had learned that it hurt to look for reasons, and she waited for the unhappiness to become first a general discontent, then a kind of melancholy, and finally the normal labor of every day:

Yet now they were both angry because of the conditions she worked in; they couldn’t tolerate it. You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn’t happen to the women important to them and that—this was the idea they had grown up with—they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed.

Good or bad, all men believe that after every one of their undertakings you have to put them on an altar as if they were St. George slaying the dragon.

The mind, ah yes, the evil is there, it’s the mind’s discontent that causes the body to get sick.

made no sound but gave off an intense odor. Who knows what feeling I would have had about Naples, about myself, if I had waked every morning not in my neighborhood but in one of those buildings along the shore. What am I seeking? To change my origins? To change, along with myself, others, too?

In fact, it seemed to me that even the pain I caused, the humiliation and attacks I endured, were working in my favor.

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.