1
The solitude of women's minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it's a waste to be separated from each other without procedures, without tradition.Elena Ferrante
2
Don’t be timid. You’re a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present. And begin with the scum in your area, put their backs to the wall.Elena Ferrante
3
I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew now to be not only a man in the right way, but also a woman.Elena Ferrante
4
You really work in those conditions?” She, irritated by the contact, pulled her arm away, protesting: “And how do you work, the two of you, how do you work?” They didn’t answer. They worked hard, that was obvious. And at least Enzo in front of him, in the factory, women worn out by the work, by humiliations, by domestic obligations no less than Lila was. Yet now they were both angry because of the conditions _she_ worked in; they couldn’t tolerate it. You had to hide everything from men. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn’t happen to the women important to them and that–this was the idea they had grown up with–they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed. In the face of that silence Lila got even angrier. "Fuck off, " she said, "you and the working class.Elena Ferrante
5
You’re really a good girl, poor you.Elena Ferrante
6
...maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.Elena Ferrante
7
What’s got into me? Do I want children? Do I want to be a mamma, nursing and singing lullabies? Marriage plus pregnancy? And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I’m safe?Elena Ferrante