Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “She’s tired of making evasive efforts when it’s easier, effortless, to give in.”

— Sally Rooney

452. “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

453. “Of course if we all stay alone and practise celibacy and carefully police our personal boundaries, many problems will be avoided, but it seems we will also have almost nothing left that makes life worthwhile.”

— Sally Rooney

454. “It’s something to do with capitalism, she said. Yeah. Everything is, that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

456. “I love you, alright? She had a strange, dazed look on her face as she listened, holding her hand to her cheek. Even though I’m a psychiatric case, she said. He laughed, standing upright and closing the door behind him. Yeah, he answered. Even though we both are.”

— Sally Rooney

457. “You have a soothing effect on me. You know, the things I would normally worry about, they don’t really seem that worrying when I talk to you.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

459. “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

460. “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

461. “Alice, I think I’ve also experienced that sensation you had in the convenience shop. For me it feels like looking down and seeing for the first time that I’m standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying vertical height, and the only thing supporting my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on earth.”

— Sally Rooney

462. “We were predictable to each other, like two halves of the same brain.”

— Sally Rooney

463. “Jesus emphasized the necessity of loving others without regard to our own self interest. In a way, when we love fictional characters, know that they can never love us in return, is that not a method of practicing in miniature the kind of personally disinterested love to which Jesus calls us? I mean that sympathetic engagement is a form of desire with an object but without a subject a way of wanting without wanting; desiring for others not what I want for myself but the way I want for myself.”

— Sally Rooney

464. “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

465. “Sometimes this felt like a failure to take an interest in my own life, which depressed me. On the other hand, I felt that my disinterest in wealth was ideologically healthy.”

— Sally Rooney

466. “My discovery that I was in love with Nick, not just infatuated but deeply personally attached to him in a way that would have lasting consequences for my happiness, had prompted me to feel a new kind of jealousy toward Melissa. I.”

— Sally Rooney

467. “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

468. “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

469. “Bobbi thinks depression is a humane response to the conditions of late capitalism.”

— Sally Rooney

470. “How graceful she looked in the crowd, his eyes followed her, her long beautiful neck, her shoulders gleaming in the sunlight. Like watching his life walk away from him.”

— Sally Rooney

471. “It has become normal in my life, for example, to send text messages like the following: tillerson out at state lmaoooo.”

— Sally Rooney

472. “My theory would be, people like them two are different from you and me, he said. You’ll only drive yourself crazy trying to make them act the way you want.”

— Sally Rooney

473. “Every subsequent hour since I saw him has been worse than the last.”

— Sally Rooney

474. “He gives a short, unhappy laugh.”

— Sally Rooney

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything. 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 inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.”

— 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. “We’ll always be in each other’s lives and we’ll always have this feeling between us, and it’s better.”

— Sally Rooney

482. “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

483. “And who am I to ask for humility and openness from other people? What have I ever given the world to ask so much in return? I could disintegrate into a heap of dust, for all the world cares, and that’s as it should be.”

— Sally Rooney

484. “As a teenager I thought I would rather die than have babies, and then in my twenties I vaguely assumed it was something that would just happen to me eventually, and now that I’m about to turn thirty, I’m starting to think: well? There isn’t anyone queuing up to help me fulfil this biological function, needless to say. And I also have a weird and completely unexplained suspicion that I might not be fertile. There is no medical reason for me to think this.”

— Sally Rooney

485. “He only looked handsome because he was handsome, though Bobbi wasn’t sensitive to the effects of beauty like I was.”

— Sally Rooney

486. “For me it feels like looking down and seeing for the first time that I’m standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying vertical height, and the only thing supporting my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on eart. And I always end up thinking: I don’t even want to be up here.”

— Sally Rooney

487. “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

488. “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

489. “I began to feel it all over again – the nearness, the possibility of beauty, like a light radiating softly from behind the visible world, illuminating everything.”

— Sally Rooney

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “She feels pleasurably crushed under the weight of his power over her, the vast ecstatic depth of her will to please him.”

— Sally Rooney

494. “Everything’s going to be alright, he says. Trust me. I love you, I’m not going to let anything like that happen to you again. For a second or two she holds his gaze and then finally she closes her eyes. She sits back in the passenger seat, head against the headrest, hand still clutching the tissue at her face. It seems to him an attitude of extreme weariness, or relief. Thank you, she says.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

497. “It’s weird knowing someone just casually, he said, and then later finding out they’re observing things all the time. Its like, God, what has this person noticed about me?”

— Sally Rooney

498. “What if I’m the one who can’t let myself be happy? Because I’m scared, or I prefer to wallow in self-pity, or I don’t believe I deserve good things, or some other reason. Whenever something good happens to me I always find myself thinking: I wonder how long it will be until this turns out badly. And I almost want the worst to happen sooner, sooner rather than later, and if possible straight away, so at least I don’t have to feel anxious about it anymore.”

— Sally Rooney

499. “It seems that there exists a curiously unexplained belief that the conditions of exploitation will by themselves generate a solution to exploitation- and that to suggest otherwise is condescending and superior, like mansplaining. But what if the conditions don’t generate the solution? What if we’re waiting for nothing, and all these people are suffering without the tools to end their own suffering?”

— Sally Rooney

500. “I had the sense that something in my life had ended, my image of myself as a whole or normal person maybe.”

— Sally Rooney