The Story of the Lost Child Quotes

“Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. I did so then, and finally it seemed that I had only come up against yet another proof of how splendid and shadowy our friendship was, how long and complicated Lila’s suffering had been, how it still endured and would endure forever.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“I soon discovered that I was getting used to being happy and unhappy at the same time, as if that were the new, inevitable law of my life.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“To write, you have to want something to survive you.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“As for infidelities, he said, if you don’t find out about them at the right moment they’re of no use: when you’re in love you forgive everything. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. And he went on like that, piling up painful remarks about the blindness of people in love.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“Lies are better than tranquilizers.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“No, to produce ideas you don't have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“the laws work for those who fear them, not for those who violate them.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“Eliminating herself was a sort of aesthetic project. One can't go on anymore, she said, electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave traces of yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“The depressed don’t write books. People who are happy write, people who travel, are in love, and talk and talk with the conviction that, one way or another, their words always go to the right place.”
“Isn’t that how it is?”
No, words rarely go to the right place, and if they do, it’s only for a very brief time. Otherwise they’re useful for speaking nonsense, as now. Or for pretending that everything is under control.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“She possessed intelligence and didn't put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the world are merely a sign of vulgarity. That was the fact that must have beguiled Nino: the gratuitousness of Lila's intelligence.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“When there’s too much silence, she said, so many ideas come to mind, I don’t pay attention. Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause, there are the likable ones and the unlikable, the good and the bad, everything in the end consoles”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“In the wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“It's only and always the two of us who are involved, she who wants me to give her what nature and circumstances kept, I who can't give what she demands; she who gets angry at my inadequacy and out of spite wants to reduce me to nothing, as she has done with herself, I who have written for months and months to give her a form whose boundaries won't dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn, calm myself.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“Perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn’t been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“To be born in that city is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“I had long since realized that each of us organizes memory as it suits him, I'm still surprised when I do it myself. But it surprised me that one could go so far as to give the facts an arrangement that went against one's own interests.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“You can be hurt only if you love someone. But I don’t love anyone.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“To carry out any project to which you attach your own name you have to love yourself.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“What a waste it would be, I said to myself, to ruin our story by leaving too much space for ill feelings: ill feelings are inevitable, but the essential thing is to keep them in check.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“Good feelings are fragile, with me love doesn’t last. Love for a man doesn’t last, not even love for a child, it soon gets a hole in it. You look in the hole and you see the nebula of good intentions mixed up with the nebula of bad.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“What a fuss for a name: famous or not, it's only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“in his view love ended only when it was possible to return to oneself without fear or disgust,”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“They were complicated years. The order of the world in which we had grown up was dissolving. The old skills resulting from long study and knowledge of the correct political line suddenly seemed senseless. Anarchist, Marxist, Gramscian, Communist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, worker were quickly becoming obsolete labels or, worse, a mark of brutality. The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere. Meanwhile, by means legal and illegal, all the accounts that remained open in the state and in the revolutionary organizations were being closed with a heavy hand. One might easily end up murdered or in jail, and among the common people a stampede had begun.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet of my mind. I can’t stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, break.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child