The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels #2)

by Elena Ferrante

“For your whole life you love people and you never really know who they are.”

Nino’s love for Lila was an impossible love. Like mine for him. And only within that frame of unattainability did the kiss he had given her in the middle of the sea begin to seem utterable.

“When one is loved one tends to love in return.

I believe that she didn’t know herself.

convinced that I—through insensitivity, through a less acute vision, through incapacity to grasp what she, instead, is able to grasp—have never truly understood that same person, never realized his qualities.

I pretended a detachment I didn’t have.

“he even wanted to publish that nonsense of yours in a review. Sometimes I don’t like you, Lenù, you diminish everything and everyone, even people who are lovable if you just look at them.”

I’m the one who’s prepared to do anything, and it’s never happened to me with anyone, and I’m glad that it’s happening now.”

“Aren’t we friends anymore?” “No.”

the beauty of things is a trick, the sky is the throne of fear; I’m alive, now, here, ten steps from the water, and it is not at all beautiful, it’s terrifying; along with this beach, the sea, the swarm of animal forms, I am part of the universal terror; at this moment I’m the infinitesimal particle through which the fear of every thing becomes conscious of itself;