The Story Of A New Name Quotes

"Ferrante can do a woman’s interior dialogue like no one else, with a ferocity that is shockingly honest, unnervingly blunt."

"Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name. Book two in her Naples trilogy. Two words: Read it."

"The Story of a New Name, like its predecessor, is fiction of the very highest order."

"No one has a voice quite like Ferrante’s. Her gritty, ruthlessly frank novels roar off the page with a barbed fury, like an attack that is also a defense."

"I couldn’t believe that Stefano, so kind, so in love, had given Marcello Solara the vestige of the child Lila, the evidence of her work on the shoes she had designed."

"I thought of running after her, grabbing her hand, whispering to her let’s get out, out of here. But I didn’t move."

"If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately."

"I understood only later that I can be quietly unhappy, because I’m incapable of violent reactions, I fear them, I prefer to be still, cultivating resentment."

"What was I, here with Antonio, secretly, in this rusting ruin, with the scurrying rats, my skirt raised over my hips, my underpants lowered, yearning and anguished and guilty, while she lay naked, with languid detachment, on linen sheets, in a hotel that looked out on the sea, and let Stefano violate her, enter her completely, give her her seed, impregnate her legitimately and without fear?"

"My glasses flew to the floor and immediately I shouted with bitter joy, and not a hint of dialect, 'See what you’ve done? You’ve broken my glasses and now because of you I can’t study, I’m not going to school anymore.'"

"I hoped to wake in the morning without desires."

"I, I thought, am not capable of loving anyone like that, not even Nino, all I know is how to get along with books."

"My heart was pounding, my feelings were confused. Maybe I wanted to ask her to tell me to my face that our friendship was over."

"Calm down after he had thrown the blame on her father and brother, calm down when all three had treated her like an old rag, a rag for wiping up the floor."

"Politics is ugly but it's important for making money."

"What have I done, she thought, dazed by wine, and what is this gold circle, this glittering zero I've stuck my finger in."

"He was never Stefano, she seemed to discover suddenly, he was always the oldest son of Don Achille."

"It's relaxing, I thought, I was wrong not to come sooner."

"I saw that chemistry, so boring for me, provoked in her that narrow look."

"It seemed to me that, thanks to the humiliation of the unpublished article, I had thoroughly understood my inadequacy."

"Everything seemed to be against me. At school I couldn’t get the grades I used to, even though I had begun to study again. The days passed without even a moment during which I felt alive."

"The road to school, the one to Lila’s house, the one to the ponds were colorless backdrops. Tense, discouraged, I ended up, almost without realizing it, blaming Antonio for a good part of my troubles."

"I had to hold him tight, say that I loved him, wipe the dirt out of his mouth with my fingers."

"There was no escape. No, neither Lila nor I would ever become like the girl who had waited for Nino after school."

"It seemed that he was attributing to me a beneficent power, one that could win over Lila’s maleficent one, and this flattered me."

"We both lacked something intangible but fundamental, which was obvious in her even if you simply saw her from a distance, and which one possessed or did not, because to have that thing it was not enough to learn Latin or Greek or philosophy, nor was the money from groceries or shoes of any use."

"There are things you know that can’t be said."

"But as soon as we were in front of the dressmaker’s window I became nervous again."

"Yet Lila, in his words, was no longer a person who couldn’t be controlled but a sort of precious fluid stored in a container that belonged to him."

"Stefano told everyone, even in the grocery, about Carosone and De Sica, so that the story spread and Lila’s mother, Nunzia, as long as she lived, went around repeating to everyone that her daughter would have had the opportunity of becoming a singer and actress, appearing in the film Marriage Italian Style, going on television, even becoming an Egyptian princess, if the dressmaker of the Rettifilo had not been so reticent and if fate had not let her marry, at the age of sixteen, Stefano Carracci."

"I felt that my old dispute with the religion teacher on the role of the Holy Spirit had been presumptuous, and I regretted not having listened."

"The only thing that seemed positive was that, the morning I went to see the grades, the janitor came up and handed me a package left by Professor Galiani."

"Now that there was no school, waking up in the morning became traumatic, a kind of painful blow to the head."

"I started to borrow novels from the circulating library, and read one after the other. But in the long run they didn’t help."

"They presented intense lives, profound conversations, a phantom reality more appealing than my real life."

"I knew I had made a mistake with her, too. I had done something stupid."

"How much do you want to bet you’re wrong? Stefano will give his permission."

"I’m pregnant," she said. And without waiting for me to react she muttered, "It’s so hot," left the book, went to the edge of the concrete, hurled herself without hesitation into the water, yelling at Antonio, "Tonì, save me!"

"I had too many worries and, whatever I did, the feeling of always being in the wrong."

"Men insert their thingy in you and you become a box of flesh with a living doll inside."

"Seventeen years of shit," she said in dialect, with apparent cheer, her eyes full of sarcasm.

"All I know is they’ll have to kill me to do what they want with my photograph."

"They have placated Michele," she said, "just as they placated Marcello. They used me—to them I’m not a person but a thing. Let’s give him Lina, let’s stick her on a wall, since she’s a zero, an absolute zero."

"I bring him wealth, a son, what more does he want?"

"She shouted that if he wanted someone who obeyed, and that’s all, he was out of luck; she was not his mother or his sister, she would always make life difficult for him."

"Maybe she didn’t even know what she wanted, she felt only that she couldn’t find peace."

"The body of the bride Lila appeared cruelly shredded."

"It’s difficult to say what had moved her: maybe her sense of impotence in the face of our poverty, maybe the generosity of the grocer’s wife, I don’t know."

"With the black paper, with the green and purple circles that Lila drew around certain parts of her body, with the blood-red lines with which she sliced and said she was slicing it, she completed her own self-destruction in an image."

"She asked me to go with her that evening to Piazza dei Martiri. There we would find the Solaras, Gigliola, Pinuccia, her brother. She wanted me to help her, support her."

"I felt that she was seeing something that wasn’t there, and that she was struggling to make us see it, too."

"I remember that she looked bewildered; she touched her forehead with her fingers."

"The gigantic image of Lila in her wedding dress could be seen at a distance, leaning against the center wall."

"It acted in the depths, it dug deeper than money."

"The cash of two grocery stores, and even of the shoe factory and the shoe store, was not sufficient to hide our origin."

"She denied it. 'He understands only this,' she replied, rubbing together thumb and index finger."

"Lila’s pregnancy lasted scarcely more than ten weeks; then the midwife came and scraped away everything."

"She burst out laughing as I had never heard her laugh, a free, self-mocking laugh."

"She abandoned us, headed straight toward Michele Solara, in a playfully flirtatious way."

"I saw that her husband followed her with his gaze. I saw that he didn’t take his eyes off her all the while she and Michele walked, talking."

"Lila left Michele laughing, but as she entered the shop her face was suddenly drained of life, she shut herself in the back room where the toilet was."

"All you could see, at the top, was a very vivid eye, encircled by midnight blue and red."

"Rino pretended to ignore her, but he turned to Stefano as if his brother-in-law were to blame for what was happening."

"I thought that maybe their relationship had been strengthened by the fact that Pasquale was engaged to Ada, who worked in the old grocery, and was the brother of Carmen, who worked with her in the new one."

"The next day she went back to work in the new grocery with Carmen Peluso."

"She dragged me into the back of the shop and asked, in a tone of amusement: 'You remember our bet?'"

"She doesn’t want children,' Stefano complained."

"Our Lord gives children and Our Lord takes them away, I don’t want to hear that nonsense."

"I had understood this, and finally there was something that I knew better than she did, I had learned it not on those streets but outside the school, looking at the girl who came to meet Nino."

"But she said almost nothing, in fact she seemed embarrassed, as if she didn’t really understand what I was talking about."

"It’s water under the bridge," I said, and reminded her of the conclusions she had come to when she was engaged to Stefano. "What you’re talking about is what’s behind us, we are something else."

"The shoes—I understood—had come out of her brain only that one time and they wouldn’t again."

"I always have to prove that I can be better."

"They know everything and they don’t know a thing."

"Today we should make war on the atomic arsenals, should make war on war itself."

"I admired her courage, the stubborn capacity for love, the seriousness of her attachment to Alfonso."

"If you don’t have a solid knowledge of the problems and if you don’t find lasting solutions, then naturally violence breaks out. But the people who rebel aren’t to blame, it’s the ones who don’t know how to govern."

"It meant that Lila, in spite of the strength she displayed at all times, was weak."

"I felt wild, reckless, but I was glad about it. There was a part of me that was sick of being a sensible person."

"He felt strong if he took the lead and weak if he lacked words."

"What were we doing? A discussion? Practicing for future confrontations with people who had learned to use words as we had? An exchange of signals to prove to ourselves that such words were the basis of a long and fruitful friendship? A cultivated screen for sexual desire? I don’t know."

"And how pleasantly crushed I felt confronted by his long profile, his broad shoulders and narrow chest, that taut skin, the sole, dark covering of his thinness, merely bones, muscles, tendons."

"I was absorbed by these throbbing thoughts when I heard a roar behind me and noisy cries of my name."

"I realized that he didn’t know who Chabod was and from that I got an electrifying sensation of fullness."

"But I also understood that there was no comparison with the exchanges I had had with Lila years earlier, which ignited my brain, and in the course of which we tore the words from each other’s mouth, creating an excitement that seemed like a storm of electrical charges."

"For your whole life you love people and you never really know who they are."

"Life is like that: one day you're getting hit, the next kissed."

"Nothing, nothing, she explained, in Winnie’s life, nothing in her gestures, nothing in her head, was happy, not that day or the preceding days."

"Life without seeing and without speaking, without speaking and listening, life without a covering, without a container, is shapeless."

"Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima were two things that couldn’t be compared, that Pearl Harbor was a vile act of war and Hiroshima was an idiotic, fierce, vindictive horror, worse, much worse, than the Nazi massacres."

"The Americans should be tried like the worst criminals, those who do terrible things to terrorize the living and keep them on their knees."

"Once at the beach she apologized, muttering, You’re so good that sometimes you make me mad."

"How lovely it would be to go out early in the morning, with the cool air, the scents."

"It seemed to me that I was watching a performance without substance."

"If someone from Naples who knows Stefano sees them?"

"That you leave your husband. Now. Let’s all of us go together to the phone and you’ll tell him."

"It's not a matter of more beauty or less, more liking or less; it's that some people attract me and others don't, it's nothing to do with how they are really."

"One becomes affectionate toward men slowly, whether they coincide or not with whomever in the various phases of life we have taken as the model of a man."

"A moment is enough to change the direction of your life completely."

"We would devote the next day to overcoming Nunzia’s opposition."