The Story of the Lost Child (The Neapolitan Novels, #4)

by Elena Ferrante

Now that I’m close to the most painful part of our story, I want to seek on the page a balance between her and me that in life I couldn’t find even between myself and me.

since I was a girl, I had observed in my mother and other women the most humiliating aspects of family life, of motherhood, of subjection to males.

love ended only when it was possible to return to oneself

He had rid himself so fiercely of memory, language, the capacity to find meaning that it seemed obvious the hatred he had for himself, for his own skin, for his moods, for his thoughts and words, for the brutal corner of the world that had enveloped him.

Everything that struck me—my studies, books, Franco, Pietro, the children, Nino, the earthquake—would pass, and I, whatever I among those I was accumulating, I would remain firm,

There are moments when what exists on the edges of our lives, and which, it seems, will be in the background forever—an empire, a political party, a faith, a monument, but also simply the people who are part of our daily existence—collapses in an utterly unexpected way, and right when countless other things are pressing upon us.

We have been capable of attending only to our own affairs—she murmured, bursting into tears—not Pasquale, Pasquale grew up as our father taught him.