Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “It was so much harder to reconcile herself to the idea of helping a few, like she would rather help no one than do something so small and feeble, but that wasn’t it either.”

— Sally Rooney

452. “He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her.”

— Sally Rooney

453. “I know that it’s not the life you imagined for me, Alice – buying a house and having children with a boy I grew up with. It’s not the life I used to imagine for myself either. But it’s the life I have, the only one. And as I write you this message I’m very happy. All my love.”

— Sally Rooney

454. “I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born as the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us. Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some point in the future another will take its place. In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.”

— Sally Rooney

455. “When we were young, we thought our responsibilities stretched out to encompass the earth and everything that lived on it.”

— Sally Rooney

456. “Sometimes when I get really sad and depressed, you know, I lie in bed and think about you. I don’t mean in a sexual way. I just think about the goodness of you as a person. And since you like me, or you love me, I must be okay.”

— Sally Rooney

457. “Marianne wonders what it would be like to belong here, to walk down the street greeting people and smiling. To feel that life was happening here, in this place, and not somewhere else far away.”

— Sally Rooney

458. “I try to be nice to you, he says, but you always throw it back at me. She doesn’t think that’s true, but she knows he probably thinks it is.”

— Sally Rooney

459. “If two people make each other happy then it’s working.”

— Sally Rooney

460. “Marianne is neither admired nor reviled anymore. People have forgotten about her. She’s a normal person now. She walks by and no one looks up. She swims in the college pool, eats in the Dining Hall with damp hair, walks around the cricket pitch in the evening.”

— Sally Rooney

461. “Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence?”

— Sally Rooney

462. “I was like an empty cup, which Nick had emptied out, and now I had to look at what had spilled out of me: all my delusional beliefs about my own value and my pretensions to being a kind of person I wasn’t. While I was full of these things I couldn’t see them. Now that I was nothing, only an empty glass, I could see everything about myself.”

— Sally Rooney

463. “But, I think more importantly, great novels engage my sympathies and make me desire things.”

— Sally Rooney

464. “Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life?”

— Sally Rooney

465. “Is this how it’s going to be for the rest of our lives? Time dissolving into thick dark fog, things that happened last week seeming years ago, and things that happened last year feeling like yesterday. I hope this is a side effect of lockdown and not simply a consequence of growing older.”

— Sally Rooney

466. “You live through certain things before you understand them.”

— Sally Rooney

467. “If we have to go to our deaths for the greater good of humankind, I will accept that like a lamb, because I haven’t deserved this life or even enjoyed it.”

— Sally Rooney

468. “Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure in his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.”

— Sally Rooney

469. “Just look at what conservatives make of the environment: their idea of conservation is to extract, pillage and destroy, ‘because that’s what we’ve always done’ – but because of that very fact, it’s no longer the same earth we do it to.”

— Sally Rooney

470. “E penso che se credessi in Dio, non vorrei prostrarmi davanti a lui per chiedergli perdono. Vorrei solo ringraziarlo ogni giorno, per tutto.”

— Sally Rooney

471. “It’s like something he assumed was just a painted backdrop all his life has revealed itself to be real: foreign cities are real, and famous artworks, and underground railway systems, and remnants of the Berlin Wall. That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.”

— Sally Rooney

472. “We can’t conserve anything, and especially not social relations, without altering their nature, arresting some part of their interaction with time in an unnatural way. Just look at what conservatives make of the environment: their idea of conservation is to extract, pillage and destroy, ‘because that’s what we’ve always done’ – but because of that very fact, it’s no longer the same earth we do it to.”

— Sally Rooney

473. “He told me he thought helplessness was often a way of exercising power.”

— Sally Rooney

474. “At the moment, the cycle of insincere public apologies is probably making everyone suspicious of forgiveness. But what should people who have done terrible things in the past actually do? Spontaneously advertise their own sins in order to pre-empt public exposure? Just try never to accomplish anything that might bring them increased scrutiny of any kind?”

— Sally Rooney

475. “Standing in this house was like watching someone familiar smile at me, but with missing teeth.”

— Sally Rooney

476. “I never want you to feel obliged to me, he went on. If I’ve ever done anything for you, it was really for myself, because I’ve wanted to be close to you. And, if I’m honest, I’ve wanted to feel that you needed me, that you couldn’t do without me. Do you understand what I’m saying? I don’t think I’m being very clear at all. I mean that you’ve done much more for me, really, than I’ve ever done for you. And I’ve needed you more. I do need you more, a lot more, than you need me.”

— Sally Rooney

477. “Supongo que todo el mundo es un misterio en cierto modo, dice al fin, Es decir, nunca puedes conocer del todo a otra persona.”

— Sally Rooney

478. “It was more that Nick’s sympathy seemed unconditional, like he rooted for me regardless of how I acted, wheras Bobbi had strong principles that she applied to everyone, me included. I didn’t fear Nick’s bad judgement like I did Bobbi’s. He was happy to listen to me even when my thoughts were inconclusive, even when I told stories about my own behavior that showed me in an unflattering light.”

— Sally Rooney

479. “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.”

— Sally Rooney

480. “I was relieved he had put the whole thing in lower case like he always did. It would have been dramatic to introduce capitalization at such a moment of tension.”

— Sally Rooney

481. “You know I love you. He didn’t say anything else. She said she loved him too and he nodded and continued driving as if nothing at all had happened, which in a way it hadn’t.”

— Sally Rooney

482. “I’m bettering myself, I thought. I’m going to become so smart that no one will understand me.”

— Sally Rooney

483. “I was in the local shop today, getting something to eat for lunch, when I suddenly had the strangest sensation – a spontaneous awareness of the unlikeliness of this life.”

— Sally Rooney

484. “But maybe it’s not easy at all – maybe to weep and prostrate ourselves with genuine sincerity is the hardest thing we could ever learn how to do. I feel certain I don’t understand how to do it. I have that resistance in me, that hard little kernel of something, which I fear would not let me prostrate myself before God even if I believed in him.”

— Sally Rooney

485. “Nothing fazes him. He doesn’t seem capable of internal conflict.”

— Sally Rooney

486. “When he saw Gillian last week she told him he was “making progress.” Mental healthcare professionals are always using this hygienic vocabulary, words wiped clean as whiteboards, free of connotation, sexless.”

— Sally Rooney

487. “Las personas pueden transformarse de verdad unas a otras.”

— Sally Rooney

488. “This nostalgic impulse is of course extremely powerful, and has recently been harnessed to great effect by reactionary and fascist political movements, but I’m not convinced that this means the impulse itself is intrinsically fascistic. I think it makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs.”

— Sally Rooney

489. “Only then Eileen saw him, Simon, standing at the church door watching her. They looked at one another for a long moment without moving, without speaking, and in the soil of that look many years were buried.”

— Sally Rooney

490. “She can’t tell whether he’s holding back a desire to pull away from her, or a desire to make himself more vulnerable somehow.”

— Sally Rooney

491. “Hi Frances, said Melissa’s voice. I said hello, though what I meant was: I hope you haven’t found out about me sleeping with your husband.”

— Sally Rooney

492. “I could see that he was trying to catch my eye and that if I returned his gaze he would give me a kind of apologetic expression. I found this idea too intense to think about, like the glare of a bare lightbulb.”

— Sally Rooney

493. “And if in the silence and solitude of his room he kneels down on the floorboards, is he praying? And for what? To be free of selfish desires – maybe. Or maybe with his elbows on the mattress, his hands clasped before him, he is only thinking: What do you want from me? Please God show me what you want.”

— Sally Rooney

494. “Nick had sent me an email that day containing a link to a Joanna Newsom song. I sent back a link to the Billie Holiday recording of ‘I’m a Fool to Want You’, but he didn’t reply.”

— Sally Rooney

495. “Was lonely and felt unworthy of real friendship.”

— Sally Rooney

496. “That was intense, wasn’t it? He told her he always found it pretty intense. But I mean practically romantic, said Marianne. I think I was starting to have feelings for you there at one point. He smiled at the ceiling. You just have to repress all that stuff, Marianne, he said. That’s what I do.”

— Sally Rooney

497. “Sometimes she felt like saying: Would you miss me, if you didn’t have me anymore? She had asked him that once on the ghost estate, when they were just kids. He had said yes then, but she’d been the only thing in his life at that time, the only thing he had to himself, and it would never be that way again.”

— Sally Rooney

498. “As a twenty-three-year-old Marianne is occasionally subject to the same dismal anxieties that characterised her adolescent life. Throughout school she was contemptuous of others, but simultaneously seized by a fear of other people’s contempt.”

— Sally Rooney

499. “Outside it’s still snowing. The exterior world looks like an old TV screen badly tuned. Visual noise breaks the landscape into soft fragments.”

— Sally Rooney

500. “In the message he’d promised to send about my work, he described a particular image as “beautiful.” It was probably true to say that I had found Nick’s performance in the play “beautiful,” though I wouldn’t have written that in an e-mail. Then again, his performance was related to the physicality of his existence in a way that a poem, types in a standard font and forwarded on by someone else, was not.”

— Sally Rooney