Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

168. “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

169. “Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head. I might as well be lying here, breathing the vile dust of the carpet onto my lungs, gradually feeling my right arm go numb under the weight of my body, because it’s essentially the same as every other possible experience;.”

— Sally Rooney

170. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

173. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

180. “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

181. “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

182. “I just think about the goodness of you as a person. And since you like me, or you love me, I must be okay. I can feel that feeling inside myself even now while I’m describing it to you. It’s like, when everything is really bad, it’s this one small feeling the size of an acorn, and it’s inside me, here.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

184. “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

185. “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

186. “Sometimes I think I was afraid that without him my life would be just the same, or even worse, and I would have to accept that it was my fault. And it was easier and safer to stay in a bad situation than to take responsibility for getting out.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

188. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

190. “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

191. “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

192. “I’m not a religious person but sometimes I do think God made you for me.”

— Sally Rooney

193. “In a way I like the idea of something so dramatic happening to me. I would like to upset people’s expectations.”

— Sally Rooney

194. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

196. “Okay. Now, because she was never really his girlfriend, she’s not even his ex-girlfriend. She’s nothing.”

— Sally Rooney

197. “To me it’s weird when animals pause because they seem so intelligent, but maybe that’s because I associate pausing with thought.”

— Sally Rooney

198. “Not that God existed in any material way but as a shared cultural practice so widespread that it came to seem materially real, like language or gender.”

— Sally Rooney

199. “I had left myself no one to confine in, no one who would feel any sympathy for what I’d done. And after all that, he was in love with someone else. I screwed my eyes shut and presses my head down hard into the pillow. I thought of the night before, when he told me that he wanted me, how it felt then. Just admit it, I thought. He doesn’t love you. That’s what hurts.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney