Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It was easy to write to Nick, but also competitive and thrilling, like a game of table tennis.”

— Sally Rooney

52. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

54. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

69. “That’s the thing about work, if it was any good you’d do it for free.”

— Sally Rooney

70. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

78. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

88. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “Her body was all soft and white like flour dough. He seemed to fit perfectly inside her. Physically it just felt right, and he understood why people did insane things for sexual reasons then.”

— Sally Rooney

95. “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

96. “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

97. “Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought.”

— Sally Rooney

98. “Things happened to him, like the crying fits, the panic attacks, but they seemed to descend on him from outside, rather than emanating from somewhere inside himself. Internally he felt nothing. He was like a freezer item that had thawed too quickly on the outside and was melting everywhere, while the inside was still frozen solid. Somehow he was expressing more emotion than at any time in his life before, while simultaneously feeling less, feeling nothing. –.”

— Sally Rooney

99. “Her voice sounds oddly cool and distant, like a recording of her voice played after she herself has gone away or departed for somewhere else.”

— 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