Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

107. “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

108. “It’s still better to love something than nothing, better to love someone than no one, and I’m here, living in the world, not wishing for a moment that I wasn’t. Isn’t that in its own way a special gift, a blessing, something very important?”

— Sally Rooney

109. “Tillerson out of state lmaoooo.”

— Sally Rooney

110. “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

111. “But we all have something wrong with us anyway, don’t we? I looked at the internet for too long today and started feeling depressed.”

— Sally Rooney

112. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

114. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

120. “I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven’t arisen. But what if that’s not true? What if I’m the one who can’t let myself be happy?”

— Sally Rooney

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn’t know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.”

— Sally Rooney

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.”

— Sally Rooney

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “No. I was frustrated sometimes but not lonely. I never feel lonely when I’m with you.”

— Sally Rooney

142. “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

143. “Ik snap niet wat dat is met mij, zegt Marianne. Ik snap niet waarom ik niet zo kan zijn als normale mensen.”

— Sally Rooney

144. “I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived.”

— Sally Rooney

145. “One of his professors calls it “the pleasure of being touched by great art.” In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr. Knightley kisses Emma’s hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is indirect. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.”

— Sally Rooney

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one the unkind ones.”

— Sally Rooney

150. “Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”

— Sally Rooney