Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “You live through certain things before you understand them.”

— Sally Rooney

452. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

454. “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

455. “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

456. “One does not think of you as a corporeal being really, but as a beam of pure intellect. And how I wish I had a little more of your radiance illuminating my life at the moment.”

— Sally Rooney

457. “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

458. “Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

460. “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

461. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

463. “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

464. “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

465. “They are not stupid people, but they’re not so much smarter than him either. They just move through the world in a different way, and he’ll probably never really understand them, and he knows they will never understand him, or even try.”

— Sally Rooney

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

473. “Could it be that easy? We just have to weep and prostrate ourselves and God forgives everything? 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.”

— Sally Rooney

474. “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

475. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

478. “If he’s nice to you I will approve of him unconditionally, and if he’s not then I’ll be his enemy forever. Does that sound reasonable? But I’m sure he’ll be nice.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

497. “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

498. “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

499. “Anyways I suggested it to him, that I could try being more submissive. And it turns out he likes to beat me up.”

— Sally Rooney

500. “I love poetry, he said. I love Yeats. Yeah, I said. If there’s one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets.”

— Sally Rooney