squid

“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“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.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“The most difficult achievement is the capacity to see oneself, to name oneself, to imagine oneself. If in daily life we use ideologies, common sense, religion, even literature itself to disguise our experiences and make them presentable, in fiction it’s possible to sweep away all the veils—in fact, perhaps, it’s a duty.”
― Elena Ferrante