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

by Elena Ferrante

She was like that, as soon as someone told her to focus on something the wish to do so vanished.

there are people who leave and people who know how to be left.”

I sometimes lied, yes, even (or especially) to myself;

“A moment is enough to change the direction of your life completely.”

There are moments when we resort to senseless formulations and advance absurd claims to hide straightforward feelings.

“What’s wrong with you?” “Fear.”

paradise on earth: a space of my own, a bed of my own, a desk, a chair, books and more books, a city a world away from the neighborhood and Naples,

Yes, it’s Lila who makes writing difficult. My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine, in the words that I’ve uttered, in which there’s often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers, in my less which is such because of her more, in my more which is the yielding to the force of her less.

What is it with that girl: courage, or madness?

But because she was thinking about it she didn’t do it.

she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.