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The Lying Life of Adults

Elena Ferrante

Top 10 Best Quotes

“I'm not wise, but I read a lot of novels.”

“I realized she wanted many things at the same time, and that kept her in a permanent state of dissatisfaction.”

“Is it so easy—I thought—to die in the life of the people we can’t live without?”

“it's good to be afraid. You need to be afraid even when there's no need, it keeps you alert. The bond with known spaces, with secure affections, yielded to curiosity about what might happen. Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many.”

“That connection between anxiety and ugliness unexpectedly consoled me. You can turn ugly because of worries—”

“One night my mother said to me: “Your father is younger than you. You’re growing up and he’s still a child. He’ll remain a child forever, an extraordinarily intelligent child hypnotized by his games. If you don’t keep an eye on him, he gets hurt. I should have understood him as a girl, but then he seemed to me a grown man.”

“I behaved like that certainly to feel free from all the old bonds, to make it clear that I didn’t care anymore about the judgment of relatives and friends, their values, their wanting me to be consistent with what they imagined themselves to be.”

“...the dead are objects that have broken, a television, the radio, the mixer, and the best thing is to remember them as they were when they were working, because the only acceptable tomb is memory.”

“They’re scared. They’re afraid we won’t be worthy of them.”

“horrors of inequality, violence, always carried”

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Book Keywords:

library, friends, memory, read, readers, death, wisdom, novels, life, eulogy, wise, literature, books, dying, goodreads, librarians

More Book Quotes:

Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

David Sedaris

Work: A Story of Experience

Louisa May Alcott

The Sandman Vol. 5: A Game of You

Neil Gaiman

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