Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us.”

— Sally Rooney

452. “My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all. If he left my line of sight for more than a few seconds, I couldn’t even remember what his face looked like.”

— Sally Rooney

453. “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

454. “She pronounced Liese’s name without any particular love or hatred, just a girl she had known, and for months afterwards, maybe forever afterwards, I was afraid that someday she would say my name that way too.”

— Sally Rooney

455. “Marianne was so totally uninterested in what people thought of her, so extremely secure in her own self-perception, that it was hard to imagine her caring for attention one way or another. She did not altogether, as far as Connell knew, actually like herself, but praise from other people seemed as irrelevant to her as disapproval had been in school.”

— Sally Rooney

456. “At midnight, sloppy drunk but hypocritically disgusted by the drunkenness of everyone around him, Connell wandered out of the ballroom and down a corridor into the smoking garden.”

— Sally Rooney

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

460. “I searched ‘can’t tell people I’m’ and Google suggested: ‘gay’ and ‘pregnant’.”

— Sally Rooney

461. “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

462. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

464. “I’m not trying to make you feel that your horrible life is in fact a privilege, although by any reasonable definition it very literally is.”

— Sally Rooney

465. “All my mania for culture, for ‘really good’ things, for knowing about jazz recordings and red wine and Danish furniture, even about Keats and Shakespeare and James Baldwin, what if it’s all a form of vanity, or even worse, a little bandage over the initial wound of my origins?”

— Sally Rooney

466. “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

467. “Tillerson out of state lmaoooo.”

— Sally Rooney

468. “People can really change one another.”

— Sally Rooney

469. “Why don’t I have any friends? I have two, but they’re weird.”

— Sally Rooney

470. “In my family we just don’t discuss things. Everything is below the surface, nothing comes out.”

— Sally Rooney

471. “Lights sparkled on the river and buses ran past like boxes of light, carrying faces in the windows.”

— Sally Rooney

472. “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

473. “This was probably the most horrifying thing Eric could have said to him, not because it ended his life but because it didn’t.”

— Sally Rooney

474. “She was attuned to the presence of his body in a microscopic way.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

476. “Everyone is understandably attached to particular identity categories, but at the same time largely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve.”

— Sally Rooney

477. “Or is it just that the pain I feel right now is so intense that it transcends my ability to reconstruct the pain I felt at the time? Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse – we can’t remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing.”

— Sally Rooney

478. “I like houses better than fields, I observed. They’re more poetic, because they have people in them.”

— Sally Rooney

479. “I didn’t know what caused this process, but 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. I had explained that theory to Philip but he’d just said: don’t be down on yourself, you’re a real writer.”

— Sally Rooney

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

487. “He’s not sure what friends are allowed to enjoy about eachother.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

489. “I had the sense that something in my life had ended, my image of myself as a whole or normal person maybe. I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn’t make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn’t make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would. I thanked my mother for the lift to the station and got out of the car.”

— Sally Rooney

490. “It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him.”

— Sally Rooney

491. “Connell hasn’t commented on any of the Facebook threads, but he has liked several comments calling for the invite to be rescinded, which is probably the most strident political action he has ever taken in his life.”

— Sally Rooney

492. “I sat on the campus cricket pitch on my own and smoked two cigarettes, one after another. I had a headache, I hadn’t eaten. My body felt used up and worthless to me. I didn’t want to put any food or medicine into it anymore.”

— Sally Rooney

493. “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

494. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

496. “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

497. “Look at me for a second. No one is going to hurt you like that again. She looks at him above the veil of white tissue, and in a rush he feels his power over her again, the openness in her eyes.”

— Sally Rooney

498. “There are worse things than getting beaten up.”

— Sally Rooney

499. “Little tears had started slipping out of my eyes and down onto the pillow. I wasn’t sad, I didn’t know why I was crying. I’d had this problem before, with Bobbi, who believed it was an expression of my repressed feelings. I couldn’t stop the tears so I just laughed self-effacingly instead, to show that I wasn’t invested in the crying. I knew I was embarrassing myself badly, but there was nothing I could do about it.”

— Sally Rooney

500. “I find it hard to believe anything really bad about myself when I consider how much he loves me.”

— Sally Rooney