Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

157. “I like you so much, Marianne said. Connell felt a pleasurable sorrow come over him, which brought him close to tears. Moments of emotional pain arrived like this, meaningless or at least indecipherable. Marianne lived a drastically free life, he could see that. He was trapped by various considerations. He cared what people thought of him. He even cared what Marianne thought, that was obvious now.”

— Sally Rooney

158. “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

159. “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

160. “Of course I know in my brain that everything we tell ourselves about human civilisation is a lie. But imagine having to find out in real life.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

162. “Shame surrounded her like a shroud. She could hardly see through it. The cloth caught up her breath, prickled on her skin. It was as if her life was over. How long had that feeling lasted? Two weeks, or more? Then it went away, and a certain short chapter of her youth had concluded, and she had survived it, it was done.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

164. “I would never pretend not to know you, Connell.”

— Sally Rooney

165. “Her gaze unsettles him like it used to, like looking into a mirror, seeing something that has no secrets from you.”

— Sally Rooney

166. “I suppose I think that having a child is simply the most ordinary thing I can imagine doing. And I want that- to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care. To prove it to whom, I wonder. Myself, maybe.”

— Sally Rooney

167. “It’s always easy to think of reasons not to do something.”

— Sally Rooney

168. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

170. “I lay there in the bath not thinking, not doing anything. After a few seconds, I heard her open the front door, and then her voice saying: she’s had a really rough day, so just be nice to her. And Nick said: I know, I will. I loved them both so much in this moment that I wanted to appear in front of them like a benevolent ghost and sprinkle blessings into their lives. Thank you, I wanted to say. Thank you both. You are my family now.”

— Sally Rooney

171. “He senses a certain receptivity in her expression, like she’s gathering information about his feelings, something they have learned to do to each other over a long time, like speaking a private language.”

— Sally Rooney

172. “The place had that strange unfurnished cleanliness that lonely houses sometimes have.”

— Sally Rooney

173. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

175. “He had just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing.”

— Sally Rooney

176. “She wanted to laugh, but she didn’t know if the joke was on her.”

— Sally Rooney

177. “You could die, I thought, and it was a nice relaxing thought at the time. I imagined death like a switch, switching off all the pain and noise, cancelling everything.”

— Sally Rooney

178. “He seemed to think Marianne had access to a range of different identities, between which she slipped effortlessly. This surprised her, because she usually felt confined inside one single personality, which was always the same regardless of what she did or said. She had tried to be different in the past, as a kind of experiment, but it had never worked. 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

179. “With Marianne it was different, because everything was between them only, even awkward or difficult things. He could do or say anything he wanted with her and no one would ever find out. It gave him a vertiginous, light-headed feeling to think about it. When he touched her that night she was so wet, and she rolled her eyes back into her head and said: God, yes. And she was allowed to say it, no one would know. He was afraid he would come then just from touching her like that.”

— Sally Rooney

180. “Marianne lived a drastically free life, he could see that. He was trapped by various considerations. He cared what people thought of him.”

— Sally Rooney

181. “He finds himself crossing things out in his journal as if he imagines some future person poring over it in detail, as if he wants the future person to know which ideas he has thought better of.”

— Sally Rooney

182. “I told him I thought he was such an appealing love object partly because he was so curiously passive. I knew I would have to be the one to kiss you, I said. And that you would never kiss me, which made me feel vulnerable. But I also felt this terrible power, like, you’re going to let me kiss you, what else will you let me do? It was sort of intoxicating. I couldn’t decide if I had complete control over you or no control at all.”

— Sally Rooney

183. “This was probably the most horrifying thing Eric could have said to him, not because it ended his life, but because it didn’t. He knew then that the secret for which he had sacrificed his own happiness and the happiness of another person had been trivial all along, and worthless.”

— Sally Rooney

184. “It was in my nature to absorb large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intellectual dominance.”

— Sally Rooney

185. “While they were driving through Longford they had the radio on, it was playing a White Lies song that had been popular when they were at school, and without touching the dial or raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the radio Connell said: You know I love you. He didn’t say anything else. She said she loved him too and he nodded and continued driving as if nothing at all had happened, which in a way it hadn’t.”

— Sally Rooney

186. “Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said. Of course it’s really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it’s harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on ‘niceness’ as a kind of stand-in. I mean this is an issue in public discourse. We end up asking like, is Israel ‘nicer’ than Palestine.”

— Sally Rooney

187. “At times a person will make eye contact with Marianne, a bus conductor or someone looking for change, and she’ll be shocked briefly into the realisation that this is in fact her life, that she is actually visible to other people. This feeling opens her to certain longings: hunger and thirst, a desire to speak Swedish, a physical desire to swim or dance.”

— Sally Rooney

188. “People in college are like this, unpleasantly smug one minute and then abasing themselves to show off their good manners the next.”

— Sally Rooney

189. “My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.”

— Sally Rooney

190. “What were these people doing, Marianne thought, writing on the Facebook wall of a dead person?”

— Sally Rooney

191. “The whole time we were together, why didn’t you tell me any of this? I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t want you to think I was damaged or something. I was probably afraid you wouldn’t want me anymore.”

— Sally Rooney

192. “He’s wholesome like a big baby tooth.”

— Sally Rooney

193. “If you weren’t my friend I wouldn’t know who I was, she said.”

— Sally Rooney

194. “You can love more than one person, she said. That’s arguable. Why is it any different from having more than one friend? You’re friends with me and you also have other friends, does that mean you don’t really value me? I don’t have other friends, I said.”

— Sally Rooney

195. “It wasn’t the first time he’d had the urge to tell Marianne that he loved her, whether or not it was true, but it was the first time he’d given in and said it. He noticed how long it took her to say anything in response, and how her pause had bothered him, as if she might not say it back, and when she did say it he felt better, but maybe that meant nothing. Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.”

— Sally Rooney

196. “She seemed like a person with no hobbies: no bookcases, no musical instruments. What do you do with yourself at the weekends, he remembers slurring. I go out and have fun, she said. This struck him even at the time as deeply depressing.”

— Sally Rooney

197. “The medication is doing its chemical work inside his brain now anyway, no matter what he does or says. He gets up and showers every morning, he turns up for work in the library, he doesn’t really fantasize about jumping off a bridge. He takes the medication, life goes on.”

— Sally Rooney

198. “Jamie is somehow both boring and hostile at the same time, always yawning and rolling his eyes when other people are speaking. And yet he is the most effortlessly confident person Connell has ever met. Nothing fazes him. He doesn’t seem capable of internal conflict. Connell can imagine him choking Marianne with his bare hands and feeling completely relaxed about it, which according to her he is fact does.”

— Sally Rooney

199. “Yeah, I said. If there’s one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets.”

— Sally Rooney

200. “He tells her that she’s beautiful. She has never heard that before, though she has sometimes privately suspected it of herself, but it feels different to hear it from another person.”

— Sally Rooney