Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “It’s funny the decisions you make because you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different. I think we’re at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.”

— Sally Rooney

52. “In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.”

— Sally Rooney

53. “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

54. “A pain in your throat may get worse when you swallow, may be almost unbearably painful when you swallow, but that doesn’t mean that the pain is gone when you’re not swallowing.”

— Sally Rooney

55. “In just a few weeks’ time Marianne will live with different people, and life will be different. But she herself will not be different. She’ll be the same person, trapped inside her own body. There’s nowhere she can go that would free her from this.”

— Sally Rooney

56. “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

57. “You’re not learning if you’re staring out the window daydreaming, Mr. Kerrigan said. Marianne, who had lost her temper by then, snapped back: Don’t delude yourself, I have nothing to learn from you.”

— Sally Rooney

58. “They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.”

— Sally Rooney

59. “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

60. “It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasised to fill the emptiness left by religion.”

— Sally Rooney

61. “For a few seconds they just stood there in stillness, his arms around her, his breath on her ear. Most people go through their whole lives, Marianne thought, without ever really feeling close to anyone.”

— Sally Rooney

62. “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. But in the end she has done something for him, she’s made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that.”

— Sally Rooney

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “Perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence, in which everyone in the world participates, towards which each of us from the position of his own separate body turns his eyes, as in a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage.”

— Sally Rooney

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

86. “It’s so hard to see the point sometimes, when the things in life I think are meaningful turn out to mean nothing, and the people who are supposed to love me don’t.”

— Sally Rooney

87. “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

88. “It’s not like this with other people. Well, I like you a lot more than other people.”

— Sally Rooney

89. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “At midnight when they all cheered Happy New Year, Connell took Marianne into his arms and kissed her. She could feel, like a physical pressure on her skin, that the others were watching them. Maybe people hadn’t really believed it until then, or else a morbid fascination still lingered over something that had once been scandalous. Maybe they were just curious to observe the chemistry between two people who, over the course of several years, apparently could not leave one another alone.”

— Sally Rooney

96. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

98. “Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine?”

— Sally Rooney

99. “I think the beauty industry is responsible for some of the worst ugliness we see around us in our visual environment, and the worst, most false aesthetic ideal, which is the ideal of consumerism.”

— Sally Rooney

100. “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