The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante Boxed Set

it would never have entered my mind that at our age one could receive a proposal of marriage.

was like crossing a border. I remember a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference. I looked not at the boys but at the girls, the women: they were absolutely different from us. They seemed

was like crossing a border. I remember a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference. I looked not at the boys but at the girls, the women: they were absolutely different from us. They seemed to have breathed another air, to have eaten other food, to have dressed on some other planet, to have learned to walk on wisps of wind

thought of the discussions I’d had with Lila and Pasquale in September and I suddenly felt that they were a true school, truer than the one I went to every day.

When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.

looked at her uncertainly. She was the same: lusterless hair, wandering eye, large nose, heavy body. She added, “Nowhere is it written that you can’t do it.”

having nothing, we had to reach a point where we had everything

Step by step Lila convinced me that one achieves security in love only by subjecting the wooer to hard tests. And so, returning suddenly to dialect, she advised me to become Gino’s girlfriend but on the condition that all summer he agree to buy ice cream for me, her, and Carmela.

“If he doesn’t agree it means it’s not true love.”

one achieves security in love only by subjecting the wooer to hard tests.

wasn’t true love, then, and so I didn’t suffer from it.