The Neapolitan Novels Quotes

“The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs. They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“Yes. A custom. Everything according to the rules, then. But Lila, as usual, hadn’t stopped there, she had soon gone further. As we worked with brushes and paints, she told me that she had begun to see in that formula an indirect object of place to which, as if Cerullo Carracci somehow indicated that Cerullo goes toward Carracci, falls into it, is sucked up by it, is dissolved in it. And, from the abrupt assignment of the role of speech maker at her wedding to Silvio Solara, from the entrance into the restaurant of Marcello Solara, wearing on his feet, no less, the shoes that Stefano had led her to believe he considered a sacred relic, from her honeymoon and the beatings, up until that installation—in the void that she felt inside, the living thing determined by Stefano—she had been increasingly oppressed by an unbearable sensation, a force pushing down harder and harder, crushing her. That impression had been getting stronger, had prevailed. Raffaella Cerullo, overpowered, had lost her shape and had dissolved inside the outlines of Stefano, becoming a subsidiary emanation of him: Signora Carracci. It was then that I began to see in the panel the traces of what she was”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“How can I explain to this woman—I thought—that from the age of six I’ve been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“I didn’t know the map of prestige.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“I felt like a drop of rain in a spiderweb, and I was careful not to slide down. We”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“—El derroche de inteligencia. Una comunidad que encuentra natural sofocar la energía intelectual de tantas mujeres con el cuidado de los hijos y de la casa es enemiga de sí misma y no se da cuenta.”
― Elena Ferrante, Saga Dos amigas

“There was something malevolent in the inequality, and now I knew it. It acted in the depths, it dug deeper than money.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“Everyone knew Enzo. He was a repeater and at least a couple of times had been dragged through the classrooms with a card around his neck on which Maestro Ferraro, a tall, very thin man, with very short gray hair, a small, lined face, and worried eyes, had written “Dunce.” Nino on the other hand was so good, so meek, so quiet that he was well known and liked, especially by me. Naturally Enzo hardly counted, scholastically speaking, we kept an eye on him only because he was aggressive.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“What’s the crime?” “The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“Professor Galiani listened and was impressed by her sincerity, by her unsettling tone, by the intense Italian of her sentences, by her skillfully controlled irony. She must have felt in Lila, I imagine, that elusive quality that seduced and at the same time alarmed, a siren power: it could happen to anyone, it happened to her, and”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“Unterwegs auf der Straße fühlte er eine innere Leere entstehen, etwas wie eine existenzielle Schwermut als Folge von Befremden.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“Quant à mes professeurs, ils semblaient avoir décidé d'emblée que j'étais une excellente élève par une sorte d'inertie inhérente à l'ensemble de ce système scolaire poussiéreux.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“I telephoned Adele. I did it with some embarrassment, which I overcame by reminding myself of all the times I had seen her at work, for my book, in the search for the apartment in Florence. She was a woman who liked to be busy. If she needed something, she picked up the telephone and, link by link, put together the chain that led to her goal. She knew how to ask in such a way that saying no was impossible. And she crossed ideological borders confidently, she respected no hierarchies, she tracked down cleaning women, bureaucrats, industrialists, intellectuals, ministers, and she addressed all with cordial detachment, as if the favor she was about to ask she was in fact already doing for them. Amid a thousand awkward apologies for disturbing her, I told Adele in detail about my friend, and she became curious, interested, angry. At the end she said: "Let me think.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“Such persistence in memorizing fashionable jargon, wasted effort. I had been conditioned by my education, which had shaped my mind, my voice.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“The university doesn’t free women but completes their repression.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“Then I felt as if my thoughts were cut off in the middle, absorbing and yet defective, with an urgent need for verification, for development, yet without conviction, without faith in themselves.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. When those horrors release a violence that reaches into our cities and our habits we’re startled, we’re alarmed.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“she advised me to become Gino’s girlfriend but on the condition that all summer he agree to buy ice cream for me, her, and Carmela. “If he doesn’t agree it means it’s not true love.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“Bons ou maus, todos os homens acham que, a cada ação deles, você deve colocá-los num altar como um são Jorge matando o dragão. — “História de quem foge e de quem fica”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“Bons ou maus, todos os homens acham que, a cada ação deles, você deve colocá-los num altar como um São Jorge matando o dragão. — “História de quem foge e de quem fica”



Assim, no Goodreads, ela vai aparecer bonitinha e fiel ao seu exemplar físico.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“Bons ou maus, todos os homens acham que, a cada ação deles, você deve colocá-los num altar como um São Jorge matando o dragão. — “”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“Bons ou maus, todos os homens acham que, a cada ação deles, você deve colocá-los num altar como um são Jorge matando o dragão. — ”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“Bons ou maus, todos os homens acham que, a cada ação deles, você deve colocá-los num altar como um são Jorge matando o dragão.”
— ”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“Bons ou maus, todos os homens acham que, a cada ação deles, você deve colocá-los num altar como um São Jorge matando o dragão.”
— *Elena Ferrante, História de quem foge e de quem fica*”
― Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

“尽管天开始下雨，我还是想继续走下去，觉得自己远离了所有人和事，去遥远的地方——这是我第一次发现的东西，这让我忘记了所有担忧；但莉拉却反悔了，那是她的计划，下雨之后，她放弃了大海，决定回到我们居住的城区。我很难理解这件事情。”
― Elena Ferrante, 那不勒斯四部曲

“赛鲁罗小时候头脑的聪慧没有找到出口，格雷科，最后她的美都展现在脸蛋和胸上，还有大腿和屁股上——那些美在这些地方都会昙花一现，就像从来没拥有过一样。”
― Elena Ferrante, 那不勒斯四部曲