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“Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream, slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, even as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor, even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain. Remove the other dirty sheets. Put them in the washing machine. Start it. Stand and watch through the window, the clothes rotating, the water and soap.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“Society does not want a man to live with a live flower inside him but to harden like mineral and live the life of a wheel. Yes, above all, the un-mortal, collective, prefabricated mechanism of society abhors the incalculable, the unique individual element, the unharnessed creative element, the flower which is apt to burst into flame and turn life into a blazing poem instead of an engineer’s workshop. That flower at all costs it is determined to cut down stone dead.

'The Case of Bill Williams', Horizon article, 1944”
― Anna Kavan

“We are occasions. 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