“I hope you’re having a good time, too. People will tell you not to waste your youth having too much fun, but they’re wrong. Youth is an irreplaceable treasure, and the only respectable thing to do with irreplaceable treasure is waste it. So do the right thing with your youth, Vivian—squander it.”
“Often he talked to Mr. Singer. With him he spoke of chemistry and the enigma of the universe. Of the infinitesimal sperm and the cleavage of the ripened egg. Of the complex million-fold division of cells. Of the mystery of living matter and the simplicity of death. And also he spoke with him of race.”
“Sarah didn’t see how she could manage the costumes and scenery alone, and she wished she could talk to Katie about it. After all, it was Katie’s play, too. But Katie seemed to have forgotten that. Everyone was leaving everything to Sarah.
“At this low point in Sarah’s life, she wished every morning that something different would happen, but when something finally did happen, she wished it hadn’t.”
“Naples was the great European metropolis where faith in technology, in science, in economic development, in the kindness of nature, in history that leads of necessity to improvement, in democracy, was revealed, most clearly and far in advance, to be completely without foundation. To be born in that city–I went so far as to write once, thinking not of myself but of Lila’s pessimism– is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.”
“…I had made the whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”
– The Story of a New Name, by Elena Ferrante
“She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood all around her. Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn. Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away… ‘And I feel that I have to find a solution, otherwise, everything, one thing after another, will break, everything, everything.'”
-Lena reads a letter from Lila, My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein
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