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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

120. “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

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. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

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. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

144. “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

145. “I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe that she is me. Confronting this fact makes me fells I am already dead.”

— Sally Rooney

146. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

148. “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

149. “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

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

— Sally Rooney