Bethany Johnsen

“Even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“Someone who takes love away from us devastates the cultural structure we've worked on all our lives, deprives us of that sort of Eden that until that moment had made us appear innocent and lovable. Human beings give the worst of themselves when their cultural clothes are torn off, and they find themselves facing the nakedness of their bodies, they feel the shame of them. In a certain sense the loss of love is the common experience closest to the myth of the expulsion from the earthly paradise: it's the violent end of the illusion of having a heavenly body, it's the discovery of one's own dispensability and perishability.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

“For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1