Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Well, I don’t feel lovable. I think I have an unlovable sort of... I have a coldness about me, I’m difficult to like.”

— Sally Rooney

52. “We developed a joke about it, which was meaningless to everyone including ourselves: what is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation?”

— Sally Rooney

53. “Dublin is extraordinarily beautiful to her in wet weather, the way gray stone darkens to black, and rain moves over the grass and whispers on slick roof tiles. Raincoats glistening in the undersea color of street lamps. Rain silver as loose change in the glare of traffic.”

— Sally Rooney

54. “If she was different with Connell, the difference was not happening inside herself, in her personhood, but in between them, in the dynamic.”

— Sally Rooney

55. “It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he’s trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him. He told Marianne once that he’d been writing stories, and now she keeps asking to read them. If they’re as good as your emails they must be superb, she wrote. That was a nice thing to read, though he responded honestly: They’re not as good as my emails.”

— Sally Rooney

56. “She slipped out of my grasp like a thought.”

— Sally Rooney

57. “I don’t know why I can’t make people love me. I think there was something wrong with me when I was born.”

— Sally Rooney

58. “I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.”

— Sally Rooney

59. “His appearance is like a favorite piece of music to her, sounding a little different each time she hears it.”

— Sally Rooney

60. “He screamed Connell’s name, and began to kiss his head with wild exuberant kisses. It was only one-all, and there were still twenty minutes left on the clock. But that was their world then. Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance. It was permissible to touch each other and cry during football matches.”

— Sally Rooney

61. “It was easy to write to Nick, but also competitive and thrilling, like a game of table tennis.”

— Sally Rooney

62. “Marianne’s classmates all seem to like school so much and find it normal. To dress in the same uniform every day, to comply at all times with arbitrary rules, to be scrutinised and monitored for misbehavior, this is normal to them. They have no sense of the school as an oppressive environment.”

— Sally Rooney

63. “Maybe I want to be treated badly, she says. I don’t know. Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I’m a bad person.”

— Sally Rooney

64. “They were standing very close. She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted, he knew that.”

— Sally Rooney

65. “Outside her breath rises in a fine mist and the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake.”

— Sally Rooney

66. “But the acclaim also felt like part of the performance itself, the best part, and the most pure expression of what I was trying to do, which was to make myself into this kind of person: someone worthy of praise, worthy of love.”

— Sally Rooney

67. “Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I’m a bad person.”

— Sally Rooney

68. “If anything, his personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced. Now he has a sense of invisibility, nothingness, with no reputation to recommend him to anyone.”

— Sally Rooney

69. “He has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong. The fact that this is even possible unsettles Marianne, and makes art seem pointless suddenly.”

— Sally Rooney

70. “I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body.”

— Sally Rooney

71. “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

72. “I guess everyone is a mystery in a way, she says. I mean, you can never really know another person, and so on.”

— Sally Rooney

73. “Her body is just an item of property, and though it has been handed around and misused in various ways, it has somehow always belonged to him, and she feels like returning it to him now.”

— Sally Rooney

74. “And hopefully I have changed, you know, as a person. But honestly, if I have, it’s because of you.”

— Sally Rooney

75. “Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently.”

— Sally Rooney

76. “This could only interfere with my other ambitions, such as achieving enlightenment and being a fun girl.”

— Sally Rooney

77. “Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others; to be thought well of, to be a person of status. He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance.”

— Sally Rooney

78. “Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance. It was permissible to touch each other and cry during football matches.”

— Sally Rooney

79. “At a certain level of abstraction, anyone could have written the poem, but that didn’t feel true either. It seemed as though what he was really saying was: there’s something beautiful about the way you think and feel, or the way you experience the world is beautiful in some way.”

— Sally Rooney

80. “I tried to make myself think about things logically. Anxiety was just a chemical phenomenon producing bad feelings. Feelings were just feelings, they had no material reality.”

— Sally Rooney

81. “I like getting compliments where I don’t have to make eye contact with the person.”

— Sally Rooney

82. “How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.”

— Sally Rooney

83. “When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child – a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth.”

— Sally Rooney

84. “I concluded that some kinds of reality have an unrealistic effect, which made me think of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, though I had never read his books and these were probably not the issues his writing addressed.”

— Sally Rooney

85. “I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things. Bobbi told me she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality’, but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterwards think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am.”

— Sally Rooney

86. “She felt happy to be surrounded by people she liked, who liked her. She knew that if she wanted to speak, people would probably turn around and listen out of sincere interest, and that made her happy too, although she had nothing at all to say.”

— Sally Rooney

87. “Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought. I need to relax and let things go. I should experiment with drugs.”

— Sally Rooney

88. “I hope we can always take each other’s sides, she says. It’s very comforting for me.”

— Sally Rooney

89. “All these years, they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.”

— Sally Rooney

90. “Is it possible we could develop an alternative model of loving each other?”

— Sally Rooney

91. “When I read the bible I picture you as Jesus.”

— Sally Rooney

92. “I laughed to myself although there was no one there to see me. I loved when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke that nobody else could understand. I liked to feel that he was my collaborator. I liked to think of him waking up at night and thinking of me.”

— Sally Rooney

93. “May the revolution be swift and brutal.”

— Sally Rooney

94. “He has never sincerely wanted Marianne to forget about him. That’s the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her.”

— Sally Rooney

95. “Marianne opens the door when Connell rings his the bell.”

— Sally Rooney

96. “Lately he’s consumed by a sense that he is in fact two separate people, and soon he will have to choose which person to be on a full-time basis, and leave the other person behind.”

— Sally Rooney

97. “People think that socialism is sustained by force – the forcible expropriation of property – but I wish they would just admit that capitalism is also sustained by exactly the same force in the opposite direction, the forcible protection of existing property arrangements.”

— Sally Rooney

98. “Their life in Carricklea, which they had imbued with such drama and significance, just ended like that with no conclusion, and it would never be picked back up again, never in the same way.”

— Sally Rooney

99. “I ran my finger along his collarbone and said: I can’t remember if I thought about this at the beginning. How it was doomed to end unhappily. He nodded, looking at me. I did, he said. I just thought it would be worth it.”

— Sally Rooney

100. “I told her I felt empty and she said that since childhood I had always looked for external factors to validate my pre-existing feelings of emptiness. But it’s okay to feel empty, she told me. I guess I would have been the world’s worst mother anyway, I said. And Clare looked out the windscreen and switched the wipers on and said: What you’re feeling is okay.”

— Sally Rooney