L'AMICA GENIALE — ELENA FERRANTE ↳ a special poster for the wonderful and brilliant jo ( @dylanlila ) <33
“I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar, like what I remember of love when I was young— love that was so often foolish in its objectives but never in its choices, its intensities.”
—Louise Glück, excerpt from “Crossroads”
If Nino Sarratore has zero haters then I’m dead
Lila and the Men Around Her: A Means of Possession
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Credit: pictures on the left are from filmmaker Catherine Breillat’s interview at the Berlin Film Festival (originally found on justabore on TikTok)
“Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn’t understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her.”
—Marguerite Duras, The Lover.
MBF Characters As Quotes Pt. 2: Lila & Stefano
“‘I think there’s something about being a young woman that feels very murderous,’ she explained. ‘That’s was I was trying to get with a song like ‘Dream Girl Evil.’ It can be dangerous for people to think you’re incredibly nice. When you get, ‘You’re an angel,’ that seems like such a high place to fall from. When I see messy or violent or terribly behaved women, especially young women, there’s a liberation. To not have to try and survive by being good.’”
—Florence Welch on her song, ‘Dream Girl Evil.’
elena & lila
when the trope is they might not be lovers in the traditional sense but they have and always will be there for each other, they come as a pair even when they are physically apart, they're always in each other's thoughts and they'd choose one another over any friend, partner or family member
Mixing MBF and Mary Oliver is criminal, I’ll never get over these two 😢
“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver
It was—she told me—as if, on the night of a full moon over the sea, the intense black mass of a storm advanced across the sky, swallowing every light, eroding the circumference of the moon’s circle, and disfiguring the shining disk, reducing it to its true nature of rough insensate material. Lila imagined, she saw, she felt—as if it were true—her brother break.
Rino, before her eyes, lost the features he had had as long as she could remember, the features of the generous, candid boy, the pleasing features of the reliable young man, the beloved outline of one who, as far back as she had memory, had amused, helped, protected her.
There, amid the violent explosions, in the cold, in the smoke that burned the nostrils and the strong odor of sulfur, something violated the organic structure of her brother, exercising over him a pressure so strong that it broke down his outlines, and the matter expanded like a magma, showing her what he was truly made of.
Every second of that night of celebration horrified her, she had the impression that, as Rino moved, as he expanded around himself, every margin collapsed and her own margins, too, became softer and more yielding. She struggled to maintain control, and succeeded: on the outside her anguish hardly showed.
GOD, WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME FERRANTE!
god.
pookie of the year 🏆
them not including Lilas studying of Naples and her whole arc with that city feels like a betrayal to her
The Tower of Babel (François de Nomé, 1630)
Studying history means having an existential crisis every other day because humans are always repeating the same mistakes 🫠
it’s a lifestyle 😝
Cyclical Theme: Elena and Lila’s friendship ended the same way it began, with two dolls.
MY BRILLIANT FRIEND - 1.01//4.10
- Karen M. Dunak, “The White Wedding Revived” in As Long As We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Postwar America