Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

457. “I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born as the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us. Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some point in the future another will take its place. In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.”

— Sally Rooney

458. “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

459. “I love you very much, you’re my best friend. But the problem is that you seem to be drawn to people who aren’t very good at giving you those responses.”

— Sally Rooney

460. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

468. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

470. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

473. “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

474. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

490. “He feels like he has ruined the life of everyone who has ever marginally liked him.”

— Sally Rooney

491. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

499. “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

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

— Sally Rooney