The Lost Daughter Quotes

“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.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“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.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“You know how children are, sometimes they love you by cuddling you, other times by trying to remake you from the start, reinvent you, as if they thought you were badly brought up and they had to teach you how to get on in the world, what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to see, the words you should use and those you shouldn’t because they’re old now, no one says that anymore.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“A woman's body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect's poison injected into a vein.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“I'm dead, but I'm fine.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“I had always considered sex an ultimate sticky reality, the least mediated contact possible with another body. Instead, after that experience, I was convinced that sex is an extreme product of the imagination. The greater the pleasure, the more the other is only a dream, a nocturnal reaction of belly, breasts, mouth, anus―of every isolated inch of skin―to the caresses and thrusts of a vague entity definable according to the necessities of the moment.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“I seemed to be falling backward toward my mother, my grandmother, the chain of mute or angry women I came from.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“Life can have an ironic geometry. Starting from the age of thirteen or fourteen I had aspired to a bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life, cultured and reflective. Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me. I didn’t think the city could contain life forms different from those I had known as a child, violent or sensually lazy, tinged with sentimental vulgarity or obtusely fortified in defense of their own wretched degradation.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“All the more reason, then, to wonder why I had confessed what was so much my own to strangers, people very different from me, who would therefore never be able to understand my reasons, and who surely, at that moment, were speaking ill of me. I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t forgive myself, I felt I had been flushed out.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“In conversations with my daughters I hear omitted words or phrases. Sometimes they get mad, they say Mama, I never said that, you’re saying it, you invented it. But I invent nothing; you just have to listen—the unspoken says more than the spoken.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote. I remember the dialect on my mother’s lips when she lost that gentle cadence and yelled at us, poisoned by her unhappiness: I can’t take you anymore, I can’t take any more.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“I had a sense of dissolving, as if I, an orderly pile of dust, had been blown about by the wind all day and now was suspended in the air without a shape.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“Sometimes you have to escape in order not to die.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“Le lingue per me hanno un veleno segreto che ogni tanto schiuma e per il quale non c'è antidoto.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“No one depended anymore on my care and, finally, even I was no longer a burden to myself.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“I realized long ago that I’ve held onto little of myself and everything of them.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“It seemed, rather, a way, like many, to convince oneself that there is always a slender branch of one's life to hang on to, and, by being suspended there, get used to the inevitability of falling.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“They were just like the relations from whom I had fled as a girl. I couldn't bear them and yet they held me tight, I had them all inside me.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“I'm dead, but I'm fine”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“ما أغبى أن يظن المرء أنه قادر على أن يروي قصته لأبنائه قبل أن يبلغوا الخمسين على الأقل.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“كم هي الأشياء التي نفعلها بالأطفال، والتي نقولها لهم خلف أبواب المنازل الموصدة!”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“لا يكبر المرء تمامًا أبدا.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“ما أغبى أن يظن المرء أنه قادر على أن يروي قصته لأبنائه قبل أن يبلغوا الخمسين على الأقل. أن يطالب بأن ينظروا إليه كما لو كان شخصًا لا وظيفة. أن يقول: أنا قصتكم فأنتم تبدؤون مني، استمعوا إليّ... قد يجديكم ذلك نفعًا.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“Physical tiredness is a magnifying glass.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“Why start arguing—better this tranquil lullaby of clichés.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“I maschi hanno sempre qualcosa di patetico, a ogni età. Una protervia fragile, un'audacia pavida. Non so più, oggi, se mi hanno mai suscitato amore o solo un'affettuosa comprensione per le loro debolezze”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“Les dije que me había salido de la carretera por culpa del sueño. Pero sabía de sobra que el sueño no tenía nada que ver. En el origen estaba un gesto mío carente de sentido del que, justamente por su insensatez, decidí enseguida no hablar con nadie. Las cosas más difíciles de contar son las que nosotros mismos no llegamos a comprender.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter