Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “So many things pass secretly between people anyway. What kind of person would he be if it happened now? Someone very different? Or exactly the same person, himself, with no difference at all.”

— Sally Rooney

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

207. “When it rains, the city closes in.”

— Sally Rooney

208. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

210. “I think you’re wrong about the instinct for beauty. Human beings lost that when the Berlin Wall came down. I’m not going to get into another argument with you about the Soviet Union, but when it died so did history. 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

211. “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

212. “She’s already applied for History and Politics in Trinity. He’s put down Law in Galway, but now he thinks that he might change it, because, as Marianne has pointed out, he has no interest in Law. He can’t even visually imagine himself as a lawyer, wearing a tie and so on, possibly helping to convict people of crimes. He just put it down because he couldn’t think of anything else.”

— Sally Rooney

213. “My favourite part of the gospels was in Matthew, when Jesus said: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you. I shared in this desire for moral superiority over my enemies. Jesus always wanted to be the better person, and so did I. I underlined this passage in red pencil several times, to illustrate that I understood the Christian way of life.”

— Sally Rooney

214. “They hated each other and I mediated their mutual hatred in a way that made me feel successfully feminine.”

— Sally Rooney

215. “The whole trip felt like a series of short films, screened only once, and afterwards he had a sense of what they were about but no exact memories of the plot.”

— Sally Rooney

216. “Perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence, in which everyone in the world participates, towards which each of us from the position of his own separate body turns his eyes, as in a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage.”

— Sally Rooney

217. “I can’t imagine what my life would look like if I cared what people thought of me.”

— Sally Rooney

218. “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

219. “My ego had always been an issue.”

— Sally Rooney

220. “She smiled, rubbed at her nose. He unzipped his black puffer jacket and put it over her shoulders. They were standing very close. She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted, he knew that.”

— Sally Rooney

221. “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

222. “If anything, his personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced.”

— Sally Rooney

223. “And I think if I believed in God, I wouldn’t want to prostrate myself before him and ask for forgiveness. I would just want to thank him every day, for everything.”

— Sally Rooney

224. “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 of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was “kindness” just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.”

— Sally Rooney

225. “Could he really do the gruesome things he does to her and believe at the same time that he’s acting out of love? Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence?”

— Sally Rooney

226. “What’s left for them, then? There doesn’t seem to be a halfway position anymore. Too much has passed between them for that. So it’s over, and they’re just nothing? What would it even mean, to be nothing to her? He could avoid her, but as soon as he saw her again, even if they only glanced at one another outside a lecture hall, the glance could not contain nothing. He could never really want it to.”

— Sally Rooney

227. “The outside world touches against her outside skin, but not the other part of herself, inside.”

— Sally Rooney

228. “I thought he was funny, I said. He hardly opened his mouth. Yeah, he had a humorous silence about him.”

— Sally Rooney

229. “I seemed to have no power over what was happening, or what was gong to happen. It felt as if a long fever had broken and I simply had to lie there and wait for the illness to pass.”

— Sally Rooney

230. “I feel like the NSA agent reading these emails has the wrong impression of us, Marianne wrote once. They probably don’t know about the time you didn’t invite me to the Debs.”

— Sally Rooney

231. “No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt.”

— Sally Rooney

232. “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.”

— Sally Rooney

233. “He always reflexively imagined ways to cause himself extreme injury when he was distressed. It seemed to soothe him briefly, the act of imagining a much worse and more totalising pain than the one he really felt, maybe just the cognitive energy it required, the momentary break in his train of thought, but afterwards he would only feel worse.”

— Sally Rooney

234. “A searing anxiety developed inside me at this thought, in the same form it always took no matter what external stimulus triggered it: first the realization that I would die, then that everyone else would die, and then that the universe itself would eventually experience heat death, a kind of thought sequence that expanded outward endlessly in forms too huge to be contained inside my body.”

— Sally Rooney

235. “She said she found religious occasions, like funerals or weddings, ‘comforting in a kind of sedative way’. They’re communal, she said. There’s something nice about that for the neurotic individualist.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

237. “Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.”

— Sally Rooney

238. “He finds himself rushing to the end of the conversation so they can hang up, and then he can retrospectively savor how much he likes seeing her, without the moment-to-moment pressure of having to produce the right expressions and say the right things. Just to see Helen, her beautiful face, her smile, and to know that she continues loving him, this puts the gift of joy into his day, and for hours he feels nothing but a light-headed happiness.”

— Sally Rooney

239. “Although he takes pleasure in seeing her look good, he feels a special sympathy with her when she looks ill or her skin is bad, like when someone who’s usually very good at sports has a poor game. It makes her seem nicer somehow.”

— Sally Rooney

240. “It’s time you’ll never get back, Marianne adds. I mean, the time is real. The money is also real. Well, but the time is more real. Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct.”

— Sally Rooney

241. “Afterward I lay on my side with A Critique of Postcolonial Reason propped half-open on the pillow beside me. Occasionally I lifted a finger to turn the page and allowed the heavy and confusing syntax to drift down through my eyes and into my brain like fluid. I’m bettering myself, I thought. I’m going to become so smart that no one will understand me.”

— Sally Rooney

242. “Now she knows that in the intervening years Connell has been growing slowly more adjusted to the world, a process of adjustment that has been steady if sometimes painful, while she herself has been degenerating, moving further and further from wholesomeness, becoming something unrecognisably debased, and they have nothing left in common at all.”

— Sally Rooney

243. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t be what you wanted.”

— Sally Rooney

244. “He did gradually start to wonder why all their classroom discussions were so abstract and lacking in textual detail, and eventually he realized that most people were not actually doing the reading.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

246. “She’s missing some primal instinct, self-defense or self-preservation, which makes other human beings comprehensible. You lean in expecting resistance, and everything just falls away in front of you.”

— Sally Rooney

247. “Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.”

— Sally Rooney

248. “Things that are over aren’t the same as things that never happened.”

— Sally Rooney

249. “When I look back at those years, I feel touched and almost pained by the simplicity of the life I was living, because I knew what I had to do, and I did it, that was all.”

— Sally Rooney

250. “Marianne is so happy for Joanna and Evelyn that she feels lucky even to see them together, even to hear Joanna on the phone to Evelyn saying cheerfully: Okay, I love you, see you later. It gives Marianne a window onto real happiness, though a window she cannot open herself or ever climb through.”

— Sally Rooney