The Days of Abandonment Quotes

“The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn't even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn't live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“Even if I tried to tell myself that I had given him nothing, that the children were mostly mine, that they had remained within the radius of my body, subject to my care, still I couldn't avoid thinking what aspects of his nature inevitably lay hidden in them. Mario would explode suddenly from inside their bones, now, over the days, over the years, in ways that were more and more visible. How much of him would I be forced to love forever, without even realizing it, simply by virtue of the fact that I loved them? 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.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“Is it true that you don’t love me anymore?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Because I lied to you? Because I left you? Because I humiliated you?”
“No. Just when I felt deceived, abandoned, humiliated, I loved you very much, I wanted you more than in any other moment of our life together.”
“And then?”
“I don’t love you anymore because, to justify yourself, you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn’t true.”
“It was.”
“No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“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.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“Because what is the face, what finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise, rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“You know how children are, sometimes they love you by cuddling you, other times by trying to remake you from the start, reinvent you, as if they thought you were badly brought up and they had to teach you how to get on in the world, what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to see, the words you should use and those you shouldn’t because they’re old now, no one says that anymore.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“I decided, enough pain. To the lips of their nocturnal happiness I would attach those of my revenge. I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“We consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women. We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“No one depended anymore on my care and, finally, even I was no longer a
burden to myself.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“You can’t leave me here to hope, when in reality you’ve already decided everything.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment: A Novel

“How heavy a body that has been traversed by death is, life is light, there's no need to let anyone make it heavy for us”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“I had always considered sex an ultimate sticky reality, the least mediated contact possible with another body. Instead, after that experience, I was convinced that sex is an extreme product of the imagination. The greater the pleasure, the more the other is only a dream, a nocturnal reaction of belly, breasts, mouth, anus―of every isolated inch of skin―to the caresses and thrusts of a vague entity definable according to the necessities of the moment.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“Mario, I wrote, to give myself courage, had not taken away the world, he had taken away only himself. And you are not a woman of thirty years ago. You are of today, take hold of today, don't regress, don't lose yourself, keep a tight grip. Above all, don't give into distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. He's gone, you're still here. You'll no longer enjoy the gleam of his eyes, of his words, but so what? Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness, don't let yourself break like an ornament, you're not a knickknack, no woman is a knickknack. La femme rompue, ah, rompue, the destroyed woman, destroyed, shit. My job, I thought, is to demonstrate that one can remain healthy. Demonstrate it to myself, no one else. If I am exposed to lizards, I will fight the lizards. If I am exposed to ants, I will fight the ants. If I am exposed to thieves, I will fight the thieves. If I am exposed to myself, I will fight myself.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“...the elegant jump from malicious gossip to compliment, seemed to me so very successful that I thought of adult normality precisely as an art of that type.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“Esistere è questo, pensai, un sussulto di gioia, una fitta di dolore, un piacere intenso, vene che pulsano sotto la pelle, non c'è nient'altro di vero da raccontare.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“I'm dead, but I'm fine.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“And to keep under control the anxieties of change I had, finally, taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm, my voice held back in my throat so that I would not make a spectacle of myself.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment