Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “Whether she was respected or despised, it didn’t make much difference in the end. Would every stage of her life continue to reveal itself as the same thing, again and again, the same remorseless contest for dominance?”

— Sally Rooney

460. “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

461. “Marianne takes significant personal pleasure in having her pain validated by professionals.”

— Sally Rooney

462. “But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.”

— Sally Rooney

463. “She was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed.”

— Sally Rooney

464. “He often makes blithe remarks about things he ‘wishes’.”

— Sally Rooney

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

469. “I know that if I really had any talent I would have done something with my life by now – I don’t delude myself about that. If I tried I’m sure I would fail and that’s why I’ve never tried.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— 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. “He can’t help Marianne, no matter what he does. There’s something frightening about her, some huge emptiness in the pit of her being.”

— Sally Rooney

474. “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

475. “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

476. “She’s tired of making evasive efforts when it’s easier, effortless, to give in.”

— Sally Rooney

477. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

487. “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

488. “There was something delicate about living like that – like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.”

— Sally Rooney

489. “The fantasy, purified by weeks of repetition, ends at the moment of death: the calm, silent eyelid that closes over everything for good.”

— Sally Rooney

490. “Overhead trees wave silverly individual leaves in absence.”

— Sally Rooney

491. “You had other friends, but i only had you.”

— Sally Rooney

492. “All books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.”

— Sally Rooney

493. “By refusing to admit that I was sick, I felt I could keep the sickness outside time and space, something only in my own head. If other people knew about it, the sickness would become real and I would have to spend my life being a sick person. This could only interfere with my other ambitions, such as achieving enlightenment and being a fun girl. I used internet forums to assess if this was a problem for anyone else. I searched ‘can’t tell people I’m’ and Google suggested: ‘gay’ and ‘pregnant’.”

— Sally Rooney

494. “And life is more changeable than I thought. I mean a life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy.”

— Sally Rooney

495. “Hi, he said. How could his feeling for her ever be anything like his feeling for other people? But part of the feeling was knowing the terrible hold he’d had over her, and still had, and could not foresee ever losing.”

— Sally Rooney

496. “Do you love him? says Connell. Her hand pauses on the door of the fridge. Unlike you to take an interest in my feelings, Connell, she says. I kind of thought that stuff was off-limits for us, I have to say. All right. Okay.”

— Sally Rooney

497. “Since when have you loved me? I said. Since I met you, I would think. If I wanted to be very philosophical about it, I’d say I loved you before then.”

— Sally Rooney

498. “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

499. “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

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

— Sally Rooney