The Lost Daughter

by Elena Ferrante

The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.

As for me, who knows. I realized long ago that I’ve held onto little of myself and everything of them.

No one depended anymore on my care and, finally, even I was no longer a burden to myself.

thought: it’s too hot, I’ve always hated crowded places, everyone talking with the same modulated sounds, moving for the same reasons, doing the same things.

How I suffered for her and for myself, how ashamed I was to have come out of the belly of such an unhappy person.

When I hung up, I was sorry I had called, I felt more agitated than before; my heart was pounding.

A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties.

I was so desolate in those years. I could no longer study, I played without joy, my body felt inanimate, without desires.

Everything in those years seemed to me without remedy, I myself was without remedy.

I didn’t like her stubborn silence when she felt she was wrong but couldn’t admit her mistake.

I was always, in some way, the origin of their sufferings, and the outlet.

“Sometimes you have to escape in order not to die.”

How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they’re at least fifty. To ask to be seen by them as a person and not as a function. To say: I am your history, you begin from me, listen to me, it could be useful to you.

Physical tiredness is a magnifying glass.

Love requires energy, I had none left.

Everything starting from zero. No habit, no sensations dulled by predictability. I was I, I produced thoughts not distracted by any concern other than the tangled thread of dreams and desires.

Losing your anchor, feeling yourself to be light is not an advantage, it’s cruel to yourself and to others.

Males always have something pathetic about them, at every age. A fragile arrogance, a frightened audacity. I no longer know, today, if they ever aroused in me love or only an affectionate sympathy for their weaknesses.

“I loved them too much and it seemed to me that love for them would keep me from becoming myself.”

My head sank inside the rest of my body, there seemed no prose, verse, rhetorical figure, musical phrase, film sequence, color capable of taming the dark beast I was carrying in my womb.

I can’t bear to be disturbed when I’m watching a movie, even if it’s a bad movie.

Deeply moved, I murmured: “I’m dead, but I’m fine.”