Elena Ferrante: The Story of the Lost Child

Being born in Naples is useful for a single 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 full of savagery and death.

Electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing. My favourite key is the one that deletes.

Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause . . . everything at the end consoles you.

As for infidelities, he said, if you don’t find out about them at the right moment they’re of no use: when you’re in love you forgive everything. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. And he went on like that, piling up painful remarks about the blindness of people in love.