Awesome

“I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“Leave, instead. Get away for good, far from the life we’ve lived since birth. Settle in well-organized lands where everything really is possible. I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay