Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

207. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

209. “He understands now that his classmates are not like him. It’s easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don’t worry about appearing ignorant or conceited. They are not stupid people, but they’re not so much smarter than him either. They just move through the world in a different way, and he’ll probably never really understand them, and he knows they will never understand him, or even try.”

— Sally Rooney

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “It’s funny the decisions you make because you like someone he says, and then your whole life is different. I think we’re at the weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions. But you’ve been a very good influence on me overall, like I definitely am a better person now, I think. Thanks to you.”

— Sally Rooney

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

226. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

228. “Connell watched Marianne pouring the tea, her smiling manner, “behave yourself,” and he felt in awe of her naturalness, her easy way of moving through the world.”

— Sally Rooney

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse – we can’t remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing. Maybe that’s why middle-aged people always think their thoughts and feelings are more important than those of young people, because they can only weakly remember the feelings of their youth while allowing their present experiences to dominate their life outlook.”

— Sally Rooney

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

236. “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

237. “Eso es el dinero, la sustancia que vuelve real el mundo. Y hay algo tremendamente corrupto y excitante en ello.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

239. “I didn’t need to play any games with you, she says. It was real. With Jamie it’s like I’m acting a part, I just pretend to feel that way, like I’m in his power. But with you that really was the dynamic, I actually had those feelings, I would have done anything you wanted me to.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “Or is it just that the pain I feel right now is so intense that it transcends my ability to reconstruct the pain I felt at the time? Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse – we can’t remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing.”

— Sally Rooney

247. “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

248. “He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

250. “And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them. There was something delicate about living like that – like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.”

— Sally Rooney