Top 35 Kathleen Rooney Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Choice is an illusion promoted by the powerful.”

— Kathleen Rooney

2. “We’ve been here all along, the world seemed to say, waiting for you. What took you so long to find us? I.”

— Kathleen Rooney

3. “My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight.”

— Kathleen Rooney

4. “Time only goes in that one direction.”

— Kathleen Rooney

5. “I do not eschew the shoulder pads and jewel tones I see on the mannequins, silly though they may be. Everything in fashion these days seems so childlike and bellicose, bright yet aggressive, a cute positivity that recasts every woman as a cross between a majorette and a Sherman tank.”

— Kathleen Rooney

6. “I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming.”

— Kathleen Rooney

7. “If one were HAPPY, then one might stay in with a book, say, and not go out hunting for fun.”

— Kathleen Rooney

8. “The city I inhabit now is not the city that I moved to in 1926; it has become a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot twists and preposterous dialogue.”

— Kathleen Rooney

9. “People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention. For.”

— Kathleen Rooney

10. “I was not a believer in things just changing. One had to try to change them.”

— Kathleen Rooney

11. “If you love something, know that it will leave on a day you are far from ready.”

— Kathleen Rooney

12. “If one knocks oneself out of one’s routine – and in so doing knocks others gently out of theirs – then one can now and again create these momentary opportunities to be better than one is.”

— Kathleen Rooney

13. “That I was a success is not apparent now; that I would be a success was not apparent then. Within.”

— Kathleen Rooney

14. “Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs. I.”

— Kathleen Rooney

15. “I despise this ad, and the TV on which it plays with those flashing lights. I mourn the conversations murdered by their juvenile intrusions.”

— Kathleen Rooney

16. “If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant.”

— Kathleen Rooney

17. “Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love.”

— Kathleen Rooney

18. “Whenever “everyone” is doing something, I seek to avoid it. But whenever someone tells me not to do something, that thing has a way of becoming the only thing that I want to do. I.”

— Kathleen Rooney

19. “When I first came to the city, a line of people often helped me discover an exciting premiere or a big sale; in 1931, such queues more often ended at soup kitchens or collapsing banks.”

— Kathleen Rooney

20. “Here’s some free advice: Make an honest assessment of the choices you’ve made before you look askance at somebody else’s.”

— Kathleen Rooney

21. “But there was no way to know, and no way to go back. I could not revise. I had been who I had been, and so I largely remained.”

— Kathleen Rooney

22. “For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith “politeness.” That’s part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity – one’s own and others’ – but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety.”

— Kathleen Rooney

23. “Friends, no. But I would not waste my exertions cultivating anyone as an enemy.”

— Kathleen Rooney

24. “New things pop up at the edges, but the middle’s where the money is.”

— Kathleen Rooney

25. “The minute you see yourself you’re forced out of your head and into your body, forced to reckon with yourself as a thing that takes up space in the world, that others can see and react to, that has a story with a beginning, middle, and end that intersects with other peoples stories. A mirror gives you perspective.”

— Kathleen Rooney

26. “This, I am reminded, is why I love walking in the city, taking to the streets in pursuit of some spontaneous and near-arbitrary objectives. If one knocks oneself out of one’s routine- and in so doing knocks others gently out of theirs- then one can now and again create these momentary opportunities to be better than one is.”

— Kathleen Rooney

27. “We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it, I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate.”

— Kathleen Rooney

28. “Even then I’d begun to think – and to push away the thought – that committing oneself to being fashionable was simultaneously committing oneself to being perishable.”

— Kathleen Rooney

29. “The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.”

— Kathleen Rooney

30. “Like many parents in middle age, he’s quick to spot changes in the world, slow to note shifts in his own perspective.”

— Kathleen Rooney

31. “Given that the majority of communication to which we are subjected in a day consists of advertising, if nearly all of that advertising insists on regarding us as pampered children, what does that do to us? It winds us up with a godforsaken second term of smarmy granddad President Ronald Wilson Reagan for one.”

— Kathleen Rooney

32. “I wasn’t glad that I hadn’t died. And I wasn’t sad that I hadn’t. I wasn’t anything.”

— Kathleen Rooney

33. “The use of the passive voice to disguise one’s role in the making of a decision is imprecise and obfuscatory. You’re a better adman than that. Active verbs! Why not say ‘I refuse to pay you fairly’?”

— Kathleen Rooney

34. “Olive was in the habit of saying “honestly” so often that even a child could see that she must be deceitful. I marveled at her mother’s prescience in having named her daughter after a green – with envy – cocktail garnish: hollow and bitter.”

— Kathleen Rooney

35. “When they sent us home from the hospital with him, it felt like we were actors, the leads in a heist film. Like we couldn’t be getting away with such outrageous treasure.”

— Kathleen Rooney

36. “As I turn and walk toward Murray Hill and home and purring Phoebe, I suspect that we do not know any more than the people of the past did, but only think somewhat differently.”

— Kathleen Rooney

37. “Other men may thrill to the sight of Old Glory rippling in the breeze, but for me the library was a better symbol of what I had taken up arms to defend.”

— Kathleen Rooney

38. “You’re different from everyone else. All the rules and emotions and obligations that guide most of us through life – they’re invisible to us. They’re natural, like breathing. But they’re visible to you.”

— Kathleen Rooney