Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.”

— Sally Rooney

2. “I will probably continue to make poor life decisions and suffer recurrent depressive episodes.”

— Sally Rooney

3. “But if you think there’s any chance that I could make you happy, I wish you would let me try. Because it’s the only thing I really want to do with my life.”

— Sally Rooney

4. “What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal – the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always – just to live and be with other people?”

— Sally Rooney

5. “It’s not like this with other people, she says. Yeah, he says. I know.”

— Sally Rooney

6. “That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.”

— Sally Rooney

7. “That’s the thing about work, if it was any good you’d do it for free.”

— Sally Rooney

8. “Most people go through their whole lives, without ever really feeling that close with anyone.”

— Sally Rooney

9. “Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it. She had that feeling in school often, but it wasn’t accompanied by any specific images of what the real life might look or feel like. All she knew was that when it started, she wouldn’t need to imagine it anymore.”

— Sally Rooney

10. “Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind him.”

— Sally Rooney

11. “Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct.”

— Sally Rooney

12. “You underestimate your own power so you don’t have to blame yourself for treating other people badly.”

— Sally Rooney

13. “It’s not like this with other people, she says.”

— Sally Rooney

14. “She believes Marianne lacks ‘warmth’, by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.”

— Sally Rooney

15. “Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought.”

— Sally Rooney

16. “Back home, Connell’s shyness never seemed like much of an obstacle to his social life, because everyone knew who he was already, and there was never any need to introduce himself or create impressions about his personality.”

— Sally Rooney

17. “Of course everything is terrible at the moment, and I miss you ardently, and I miss my family, and I miss parties and book launches and going to the cinema, but all that really means is that I love my life, and I’m excited to have it back again, excited to feel that it’s going to continue, that new things will keep happening, that nothing is over yet.”

— Sally Rooney

18. “At times he has the sensation that he and Marianne are like figure skaters, improvising their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronisation that it surprises them both. She tosses herself gracefully into the air, and each time, without knowing how he’s going to do it, he catches her.”

— Sally Rooney

19. “At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape.”

— Sally Rooney

20. “Denise decided a long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression toward Marianne as a way of expressing themselves. As a child Marianne resisted, but now she simply detaches, as if it isn’t of any interest to her, which in a way it isn’t. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter’s frigid and unlovable personality. She believes Marianne lacks “warmth,” by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.”

— Sally Rooney

21. “And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?”

— Sally Rooney

22. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, says Marianne. I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.”

— Sally Rooney

23. “Life is exactly the same. Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.”

— Sally Rooney

24. “It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness. GEORGE ELIOT, Daniel Deronda.”

— Sally Rooney

25. “I feel very embarrassed by all that now, but I was lonely and unhappy, and I didn’t understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness.”

— Sally Rooney

26. “No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.”

— Sally Rooney

27. “I was tired, it was late, I was sitting half-asleep in the back of a taxi, remembering strangely that wherever I go, you are with me, and so is he, and that as long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me.”

— Sally Rooney

28. “Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through.”

— Sally Rooney

29. “When I read the Bible I picture you as Jesus, so maybe fainting in a church was a metaphor after all.”

— Sally Rooney

30. “He was the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music.”

— Sally Rooney

31. “Marianne drags a chair back from the table and sits down. Men can be possessive, she says. I know! says Peggy. It’s crazy. You’d think they would jump at the idea of multiple partners. Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves, says Marianne.”

— Sally Rooney

32. “When he talks to Marianne he has a sense of total privacy between them. He could tell her anything about himself, even weird things, and she would never repeat them, he knows that. Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind him.”

— Sally Rooney

33. “I’m just nervous, he says. I feel like it’s pretty obvious I don’t want you to leave. In a tiny voice she says: I don’t find it obvious what you want.”

— Sally Rooney

34. “Eventually she laughed, because she wasn’t totally without spirit, and it obviously was kind of funny, just how savagely he had humiliated her, and his inability to apologize or even admit he had done it.”

— Sally Rooney

35. “Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind him. He’s not frightened of her, actually she’s a pretty relaxed person, but he fears being around her, because of the confusing way he finds himself behaving, the things he says that he would never ordinarily say. A.”

— Sally Rooney

36. “I think we’re at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.”

— Sally Rooney

37. “She tries to be a good person. But deep down she knows she is a bad person, corrupted, wrong, and all her efforts to be right, to have the right opinions, to say the right things, these efforts only disguise what is buried inside her, the evil part of herself.”

— Sally Rooney

38. “He touches his lips to her skin and she feels holy, like a shrine.”

— Sally Rooney

39. “If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.”

— Sally Rooney

40. “Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.”

— Sally Rooney

41. “Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.”

— Sally Rooney

42. “It’s funny the decisions you make because you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different. I think we’re at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.”

— Sally Rooney

43. “In just a few weeks’ time Marianne will live with different people, and life will be different. But she herself will not be different. She’ll be the same person, trapped inside her own body. There’s nowhere she can go that would free her from this.”

— Sally Rooney

44. “In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.”

— Sally Rooney

45. “A pain in your throat may get worse when you swallow, may be almost unbearably painful when you swallow, but that doesn’t mean that the pain is gone when you’re not swallowing.”

— Sally Rooney

46. “All these years they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions. But in the end she has done something for him, she’s made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that.”

— Sally Rooney

47. “For a few seconds they just stood there in stillness, his arms around her, his breath on her ear. Most people go through their whole lives, Marianne thought, without ever really feeling close to anyone.”

— Sally Rooney

48. “Nothing inside my body was trying to kill me. Death was, of course, the most ordinary thing that could happen, at some level I knew that. Still, I had stood there waiting to see the body in the river, ignoring the real living bodies all around me, as if death was more of a miracle than life was.”

— Sally Rooney

49. “They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.”

— Sally Rooney

50. “You’re not learning if you’re staring out the window daydreaming, Mr. Kerrigan said. Marianne, who had lost her temper by then, snapped back: Don’t delude yourself, I have nothing to learn from you.”

— Sally Rooney