Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “I was aware of the fact that he could pretend to be anyone he wanted to be, and I wondered if he also lacked a “real personality” the same way I did.”

— Sally Rooney

103. “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 when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us.”

— Sally Rooney

104. “It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it “the pleasure of being touched by great art.” In those words it almost sounds sexual.”

— Sally Rooney

105. “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

106. “People were always wanting me to show some weakness so they could reassure me. It made them feel worthy.”

— Sally Rooney

107. “Marianne replaces the yogurt pot in the freezer now and asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work – to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money.”

— Sally Rooney

108. “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

109. “At times I thought this was the worst misery I had experienced in my life, but it was also a very shallow misery, which at any time could have been relieved completely by a word from him and transformed into idiotic happiness.”

— Sally Rooney

110. “My ego had always been an issue. I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was.”

— Sally Rooney

111. “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

112. “I liked to sit in the library to write essays, allowing my sense of time and personal identity to dissolve as the light dimmed outside the windows.”

— Sally Rooney

113. “Anyway, as a consequence, each day has now become a new and unique informational unit, interrupting and replacing the informational world of the day before.”

— Sally Rooney

114. “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.”

— Sally Rooney

115. “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

116. “A feeling of dissociation from his senses, an inability to think straight or interpret what he sees and hears. Things begin to look and sound different, slower, artificial, unreal. The first time it happened he thought he was losing his mind, that the whole cognitive framework by which he made sense of the world had disintegrated for good, and everything from then on would just be undifferentiated sound and colour.”

— Sally Rooney

117. “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

118. “Sometimes in the middle of the day she remembers something Jamie has said or done to her, and all the energy leaves her completely, so her body feels like a carcass, something immensely heavy and awful that she has to carry around.”

— Sally Rooney

119. “I’m sorry, he said. I’m just finding you kind of hostile. You’re interpreting your failure to hurt me as hostility on my part, I said. That’s interesting.”

— Sally Rooney

120. “It’s easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don’t worry about appearing ignorant or conceited.”

— Sally Rooney

121. “Sometimes I feel embarrassed telling you stuff like that because it just seems stupid. To be honest, I still look up to you a lot, I don’t want you to think of me as, I don’t know. Deluded.”

— Sally Rooney

122. “Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labor of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.”

— Sally Rooney

123. “She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life.”

— Sally Rooney

124. “That’s the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her.”

— Sally Rooney

125. “The experience of writing them feels like an expression of a broader and more fundamental principle, something in his identity, or something even more abstract, to do with life itself.”

— Sally Rooney

126. “People look out for each other, and being Marianne’s best friend and suspected sexual partner has elevated Connell to the status of rich-adjacent.”

— Sally Rooney

127. “These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right to not love anyone.”

— Sally Rooney

128. “Cherries hang on the dark-green trees like earrings. He thinks about this phrase once or twice. He would put it in an email to Marianne, but he can’t email her when she’s downstairs.”

— Sally Rooney

129. “Peggy thinks men are disgusting animals with no impulse control, and that women should avoid relying on them for emotional support. It took a long time for it to dawn on Marianne that Peggy was using the guise of her general critique of men to defend Jamie whenever Marianne complained about him. What did you expect? Peggy would say.”

— Sally Rooney

130. “I’m glad my ancestral homeland could help nourish your class identity.”

— Sally Rooney

131. “She experiences a depression so deep it is tranquilizing, she eats whatever he tells her to eat, she experiences no more ownership over her own body than if it were a piece of litter.”

— Sally Rooney

132. “You need to get straight in your mind what you think a good society would look like, said Marianne. And if you think people should be able to go to college and get English degrees, you shouldn’t feel guilty for doing that yourself, because you have every right to.”

— Sally Rooney

133. “The connection is not obvious, at least to me, since markets preserve nothing, but ingest all aspects of an existing social landscape and excrete them, shorn of meaning and memory, as transactions. What could be ‘conservative’ about such a process?”

— Sally Rooney

134. “But then, you’re not really submitting to someone if you only submit to things you enjoy.”

— Sally Rooney

135. “I had no achievements or possessions that proved I was a serious person.”

— Sally Rooney

136. “He tells her bad things about herself. It’s hard to know whether Marianne likes to hear those things; shes desires to hear them, but she’s conscious by now of being able to desire in some sense what she does not want. The quality of gratification is thin and hard, arriving too quickly and then leaving her sick and shivery.”

— Sally Rooney

137. “I isolated myself from criticism so I could behave badly without losing my sense of righteousness.”

— Sally Rooney

138. “If God wanted me to give you up, he wouldn’t have made me who I am.”

— Sally Rooney

139. “Marianne expressed her feelings about Connell mainly in terms of her sustained interest in his opinions and beliefs, the curiosity she feels about his life, and her instinct to survey his thoughts whenever she feels conflicted about anything.”

— Sally Rooney

140. “The inside of her body seems to be gravitating further and further downward, toward the floor, toward the center of the earth.”

— Sally Rooney

141. “Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence? Outside her breath rises in a fins mist and the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistakes.”

— Sally Rooney

142. “I was appropriating my fear of total disappearance as a spiritual practice. I was inhabiting disappearance as something that could reveal and inform, rather than totalise and annihilate.”

— Sally Rooney

143. “I wrote a sample message, and then deleted the draft in case I might accidentally hit send. Then I wrote the same thing over again. I sat staring at my laptop screen until it went black. 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. These thoughts were not unusual for me.”

— Sally Rooney

144. “He finds himself rushing to the end of the conversation so they can hang up, and then he can retrospectively savour how much he likes seeing her, without the moment-to-moment pressure of having to produce the right expressions and say the right things.”

— Sally Rooney

145. “Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.”

— Sally Rooney

146. “I wasn’t used to being attacked like this and it was frightening. I thought of myself as an independent person, so independent that the opinions of others were irrelevant to me. Now I was afraid that Nick was right. I isolated myself from criticism so I could behave badly without losing my sense of righteousness.”

— Sally Rooney

147. “My body felt completely disposable, like a placeholder for something more valuable. I fantasized about taking it apart and lining my limbs up side by side to compare them.”

— Sally Rooney

148. “That sounds like a recipe for disastrous unhappiness, I said. You’re twenty-one, said Melissa. You should be disastrously unhappy.”

— Sally Rooney

149. “You think everyone you like is special, she said. I’m just a normal person. When you get to like someone, you make them feel like they’re different from everyone else. You’re doing it with Nick, you did it with me once.”

— Sally Rooney

150. “Shame surrounded her like a shroud. She could hardly see through it.”

— Sally Rooney