Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

461. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

463. “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

464. “I mean, when you look at the lives men are really living, it’s sad, Marianne says. They control the whole social system and this is the best they can come up with for themselves? They’re not even having fun.”

— Sally Rooney

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

470. “I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body. I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived.”

— Sally Rooney

471. “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

472. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

474. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

476. “And life is more changeable than I thought. I mean a life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy. It’s not just one thing or another – it doesn’t get fixed into a groove called ‘personality’ and then run along that way until the end.”

— Sally Rooney

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “I was glad the poems were only ever performed and never published. They floated away ethereally to the sound of applause. Real writers, and also painters, had to keep on looking at the ugly things they had done for good. I hated that everything I did was so ugly, but also that I lacked the courage to confront how ugly it was.”

— Sally Rooney

482. “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

483. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

490. “People who intentionally become famous – I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it – are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill.”

— Sally Rooney

491. “When I look back on what we were like when we first met, I don’t think we were really wrong about anything, except about ourselves. The ideas were right, but the mistake was that we thought we mattered.”

— Sally Rooney

492. “Dry upturned sycamore leaves scuttling like claws along the South Circular Road. The artificial buttered taste of popcorn in the cinema. Pale-yellow sky in the evening, Thomas Street draped in mist.”

— Sally Rooney

493. “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

494. “I sat staring at my laptop screen until it went black. Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought. I need to relax and let things go. I should experiment with drugs. These thoughts were not unusual for me.”

— Sally Rooney

495. “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

496. “I fixated on perceived wrongs Nick had done to me, callous things he had said or implied, so that I could hate him and therefore justify the intensity of my feelings for him as pure hatred.”

— Sally Rooney

497. “He had been in psychiatric hospital, which was news to me. I wasn’t repelled as such; I had read books, I was familiar with the idea that capitalism was the really crazy thing. But I had thought people who were hospitalised for psychiatric problems were different from the people I knew. I could see I had entered a new social setting now, where severe mental illness no longer had unfashionable connotations.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

499. “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

500. “Sometimes when I was doing something dull, like walking home from work or hanging up laundry, I liked to imagine that I looked like Bobbi. She had better posture than I did, and a memorably beautiful face. The pretence was so real to me that when I accidentally caught sight of my reflection and saw my own appearance, I felt a strange, depersonalising shock.”

— Sally Rooney