Incidental Inventions Quotes

“Translation is our salvation: it draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Translators transport nations into other nations. They are the first to reckon with distant modes of feeling. Even their mistakes are evidence of a positive force. Translation is our salvation. It draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Maybe the truth is that saying goodbye seems to me a rejection of human warmth - even the minimal warmth that makes us feel solitude less. I mean real solitude, which rises up by surprise and lasts a few seconds, the solitude that derives not from lack of company or affection, but from our innate separateness from one another.”
― Elena Ferrante; translated by Ann Goldstein, Incidental Inventions

“we protect the truth principally by telling the truth about ourselves.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Reality can’t stay inside the elegant moulds of art; it always spills over, indecorously.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“los tres puntos canónicos ya no son suficientes; se ponen cuatro, cinco, incluso seis seguidos: Estoy aquí…, me atormento…, me pregunto dónde estarás…, pienso en ti…, me gustaría volver a verte, pero… Seguro que son muy comunicativos, indican muchas cosas: ansia, vergüenza, timidez, incertidumbre, la malicia de decir y no decir, un momento en que estábamos a punto de excedernos y después nos contuvimos e incluso una forma de tomarse tiempo”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Si lo que leo o escribo me gusta, no pego ojo; si me disgusta, caigo en un sueño frágil de decepción y descontento.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Pero sigo pensando que cuando nos atribuimos de modo más o menos arbitrario la tarea de contar no debemos preocuparnos por la serenidad de quien nos lee, sino solo por construir ficciones que ayuden a contemplar la condición humana sin demasiados filtros.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“el diario me provocaba un afán de verdad. Pensaba que en la escritura no tenía sentido contenerse, de ahí que escribiera”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Talent is insufficient: if it’s not cultivated, it ends up, in the best cases, inventing the wheel, only to discover that this has been done already.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Do men learn from women? Often. Do they admit it publicly? Rarely, even today.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“I am therefore Italian, completely and with pride. But if I could, I would descend into all languages and let myself be permeated by them all. Even the terrible Google Translate consoles me. We can be much more than what we happen to be.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Why was I worried? Because if, in everyday life, I was so embarrassed, so cautious, that I scarcely breathed, the diary produced in me a craving for truth. I thought that when one writes, it makes no sense to be contained, to censor oneself, and as a result I wrote mostly—maybe only—about what I would have preferred to be silent about, resorting among other things to a vocabulary that I would never have dared to use in speaking. This”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Me invento para un periodista, pero también el periodista con sus preguntas se inventa para mí. Me invento dirigiéndome no solo a quien ha formulado las preguntas y a nuestras posibles lectoras y lectores, sino también a mí misma, o al menos una parte importante”
― Elena Ferrante, La invención ocasional

“We draw up lists of the good and the bad as if the many privileges deriving from chance aren’t there: your place of birth, your family, the inequality of opportunities.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“I hope that in the free time of old age, the wonder will return.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Reading brought on a desire to write, and writing brought on a desire to read.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“My only heroes are translators. I especially love those who are experts in the art of simultaneous translation. I love them in particular when they're also passionate readers and propose translations themselves. Thanks to them, Italian-ness travels through the world, enriching it. And the world, with its many languages, passes through Italian-ness and modifies it. Translators transport nations into other nations. They are the first to reckon with distant modes of feeling. Even their mistakes are evidence of a positive force. Translation is our salvation. It draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Am meisten fürchten müssen wir uns vor der Raserei verängstigter Menschen.”
― Elena Ferrante, Zufällige Erfindungen

“What we were at the beginning is only a vague patch of colour contemplated from the edge of what we have become.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Reality can't stay inside the elegant moulds of art; it always spills over, indecorously.

An enemy may simply be someone who, out of a sort of emotional exhaustion, has avoided the effort, the complexity, the pleasure - all the ambiguities of friendship.”
― Elena Ferrante, L'invenzione occasionale

“I love the word—in Italian, trasloco, or “across a place”—which makes me think of the momentum needed for a leap forward, a gathering of energy that propels you towards another place, where there is everything to discover and learn.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Novels, when they work, use lies to tell the truth. The information marketplace, battling for an audience, tends, more and more, to transform intolerable truths into novelistic, riveting, enjoyable lies.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“But I still think that those who are more or less arbitrarily given the job of telling stories shouldn’t be concerned about the serenity of individual readers; rather, they should construct fictions that help seek the truth of the human condition.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“The Italian word for “friendship,” amicizia, has the same root as the verb “to love,” amare, and a relationship between friends has the richness, the complexity, the contradictions, the inconsistencies”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“So I feel close to all women, and, sometimes for one reason, sometimes for another, I recognise myself in the best as well as in the worst. Is it possible, people say to me at times, that you don’t know even one bitch? I know some, of course: literature is full of them and so is everyday life. But, all things considered, I’m on their side.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“The “too” of a woman produces violent male reactions and, in addition, the enmity of other women, who every day are obliged to fight among themselves for the crumbs left by men. The “too” of men produces general admiration and positions of power.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“A young woman I’m very fond of said to me: it’s always a problem with men, I’ve had to learn not to overdo. She meant that she had trained herself not to be too beautiful, too intelligent, too considerate, too independent, too generous, too aggressive, too nice.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“Translators transport nations into other nations; they are the first to reckon with distant modes of feeling. Even their mistakes are evidence of a positive force. Translation is our salvation: it draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions

“I thought that when one writes, it makes no sense to be contained, to censor oneself, and as a result I wrote mostly—maybe only—about what I would have preferred to be silent about, resorting among other things to a vocabulary that I would never have dared to use in speaking.”
― Elena Ferrante, Incidental Inventions