{"author":"Elena Ferrante","author_id":"Elena+Ferrante","total_quotes":57,"quotes":[{"text":"You’re really a good girl, poor you.","author":"Elena Ferrante","tags":["girl","women"],"id":3652,"author_id":"Elena+Ferrante"},{"text":"I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.","author":"Elena Ferrante","tags":["childhood","violence"],"id":22637,"author_id":"Elena+Ferrante"},{"text":"Engineering -nature is engineering, so is culture, science is right behind, only chaos is not an engineer- and, along with it, the furious need to reproduce.","author":"Elena Ferrante","tags":["chaos","nature"],"id":31176,"author_id":"Elena+Ferrante"},{"text":"I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart . . . But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts . . .","author":"Elena Ferrante","tags":["writing-life"],"id":42021,"author_id":"Elena+Ferrante"},{"text":"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.","author":"Elena Ferrante","tags":["babies","breeding","childbearing","children","greatbabyshowerquotes","motherhood","pregnancy"],"id":52553,"author_id":"Elena+Ferrante"},{"text":"Only when we feel the story in each of its moments or places are we able to tell it properly.","author":"Elena Ferrante","tags":["memoir"],"id":58454,"author_id":"Elena+Ferrante"},{"text":"It was during that journey to Via Orazio that I began to be made unhappy by my own alienness. I had grown up with those boys, I considered their behavior normal, their violent language was mine. But for six years now I had also been following daily a path that they were completely ignorant of and in the end I had confronted it brilliantly. With them I couldn’t use any of what I learned every day, I had to suppress myself, in some way diminish myself. What I was in school I was there obliged to put aside or use treacherously, to intimidate them. I asked myself what I was doing in that car. They were my friends, of course, my boyfriend was there, we were going to Lila’s wedding celebration. But that very celebration confirmed that Lila, the only person I still felt was essential even though our lives had diverged, no longer belonged to us and, without her, every intermediary between me and those youths, that car racing through the streets, was gone. Why then wasn’t I with Alfonso, with whom I shared both origin and flight? Why, above all, hadn’t I stopped to say to Nino, Stay, come to the reception, tell me when the magazine with my article’s coming out, let’s talk, let’s dig ourselves a cave that can protect us from Pasquale’s driving, from his vulgarity, from the violent tones of Carmela and Enzo, and also—yes, also—of Antonio?","author":"Elena Ferrante","tags":["alienness","awakening","coming-of-age","place-in-the-world"],"id":74855,"author_id":"Elena+Ferrante"},{"text":"What a complex foamy mixture a couple is. Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn't die, it doesn't want to die.","author":"Elena Ferrante","tags":["relationship"],"id":81487,"author_id":"Elena+Ferrante"},{"text":"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.","author":"Elena Ferrante","tags":["community","friendship","women"],"id":100873,"author_id":"Elena+Ferrante"},{"text":"I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?","author":"Elena Ferrante","tags":["writing","writing-life","writing"],"id":106335,"author_id":"Elena+Ferrante"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":57,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}