The Days of Abandonment: A Novel

by Elena Ferrante

I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful. I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his.

starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.

The most innocuous people are capable of doing terrible things.”

At times the solidity of things is entrusted to irritating elements that appear to disrupt their cohesion.

We fabricate objects in a semblance of our bodies, one side joined to the other. Or we design them thinking they’re joined as we are joined to the desired body. Creatures born from a banal fantasy.

Success depends on the capacity to manipulate the obvious with calculated precision.

What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life. What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him.

the circle of an empty day is brutal, and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.