Kaustav

“We discussed ourselves a lot. But although we were women…we struggled to understand what a woman was. Our every move or thought or conversation or dream, once analyzed in depth, seemed not to belong to us. And this excavation seemed to exasperate those who were weaker, who couldn’t tolerate such an excess of self-reflection and believed that to embark on the road of freedom it was simply enough to cut off men. These were unstable times, arcing in waves. Many of us feared a return to the flat calm and stayed on the crest, holding on to extreme formulations and looking down with fear and rage.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“It wasn't my mother's laugh, the obscene laughter of a woman who knows. In Nella there was something chaste and yet vulgar, it was the laugh of an aging virgin that asailed me and pushed me to laugh, too, but in a forced way. [...] I saw myself growing old, with that laugh of malicious innocence in my breast. I thought: I'll end up laughing like that, too.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“I discovered everywhere female automations created by men. There was nothing of ourselves, and the little there was that rose up in protest immediately became material for their manufacturing.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“But when do people ever speak truthfully and when do things ever happen unexpectedly? You know better than me that it's all a fraud and one thing follows another and then another.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay