Kaustav

“There were things I couldn’t say; I could only write them. Because when I spoke, I thought; and when I wrote, I felt.”
― Benedict Wells, Vom Ende der Einsamkeit

“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

“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

“For her whole life she would sacrifice to him every quality of her own, and he wouldn't even be aware of the sacrifice, he would be surrounded by the wealth of feeling, intelligence, imagination that were hers, without knowing what to do with them, he would ruin them.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name