The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels Book 4)

They existed in people’s ears, in the eyes when the eyes looked inside and not out, in the voice as soon as it begins to speak, in the head when it thinks, because words are full of ghosts but so are images. Is it true, Mamma?

When my head says, it’s better to act in this way, I do it, and I don’t think about it anymore. If you go back to it you only make trouble.”

“No, to produce ideas you don’t have to be a saint. And anyway there are very few true intellectuals. The mass of the educated spend their lives commenting lazily on the ideas of others. They engage their best energies in sadistic practices against every possible rival.”

When she embraced me before I left, it was as if she meant to slip inside me and stay there, as once I had been inside her.

I felt the way you feel when it suddenly starts raining hard, and you look around and find no place to take shelter.

electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave traces of yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing, my favorite 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, there are the likable ones and the unlikable, the good and the bad, everything in the end consoles you.

The two of us—I and the infant, greedily seeking my nipple in her sleep, to feel that she was still part of me—were, in that place of illness, the only living and healthy part of my mother that remained.