## Metadata - Author: [[Elena Ferrante]] - Full Title: My Brilliant Friend - Category: #books ## Highlights - At that tremendous moment, full of light and sound, I pretended I was alone in the newness of the city, new myself with all life ahead, exposed to the mutable fury of things but surely triumphant: I, I and Lila, we two with that capacity that together—only together—we had to seize the mass of colors, sounds, things, and people, and express it and give it power. ([Location 1719](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079MGWXK6&location=1719)) - Then Pasquale himself began to be silent, defeated by Lila’s capacity to link one thing to another in a chain that tightened around you on all sides. I often looked at them walking together and, if at first it had been she who hung on his words, now it was he who hung on hers. He’s in love, I thought. I also thought: Lila will fall in love, too, they’ll be engaged, they’ll marry, they’ll always be talking about these political things, they’ll have children who will talk about the same things. When school started again, on the one hand I suffered because I knew I wouldn’t have time for Lila anymore, on the other I hoped to detach myself from that sum of the misdeeds and compliances and cowardly acts of the people we knew, whom we loved, whom we carried—she, Pasquale, Rino, I, all of us—in our blood. ([Location 1951](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079MGWXK6&location=1951)) - In other words, the last ten days of July gave me a sense of well-being that I had never known before. I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new. I liked everything: getting up early, making breakfast, tidying up, walking in Barano, taking the road to the Maronti, uphill and down, lying in the sun and reading, going for a swim, returning to my book. I did not feel homesick for my father, my brothers and sister, my mother, the streets of the neighborhood, the public gardens. I missed only Lila, Lila who didn’t answer my letters. I was afraid of what was happening to her, good or bad, in my absence. It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me: the fear that, in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance. And the fact that she didn’t answer emphasized that preoccupation. However hard I tried in my letters to communicate the privilege of the days in Ischia, my river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full. ([Location 2740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079MGWXK6&location=2740)) - she threw things off balance just to see if she could put them back in some other way. ([Location 3123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079MGWXK6&location=3123))