Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “To love someone under capitalism you have to love everyone. Is that theory or just theology?”

— Sally Rooney

253. “I started to think about his physical presence in the city, that somewhere inside the city’s structure, standing or sitting, holding his arms one way or another, dressed or undressed, he was present, and Dublin was like an advent calendar concealing him behind one of its million windows.”

— Sally Rooney

254. “She thinks of Connell saying: People are a lot more knowable than they think they are. But still he has something she lacks, an inner life that does not include the other person.”

— Sally Rooney

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he used as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.”

— Sally Rooney

261. “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

262. “At this point I felt a weird lack of self-recognition, and I realised that I couldn’t visualise my own face and body at all. It was like someone had lifted the end of an invisible pencil and just gently erased my entire appearance.”

— Sally Rooney

263. “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

264. “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

265. “When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child – a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all.”

— Sally Rooney

266. “They look at one another. She’s a little flushed, and her lipstick is smudged just slightly on her lower lip. Her gaze unsettles him like it used to, like looking into a mirror, seeing something that has no secrets from you.”

— Sally Rooney

267. “The streets were quiet and dark, and the air was oddly warm and still, and on the quays the office buildings were all lit up inside, and empty, and underneath everything, beneath the surface of everything, I began to feel it all over again – the nearness, the possibility of beauty, like a light radiating softly from behind the visible world, illuminating everything.”

— Sally Rooney

268. “Connell was laughing at nothing, just because so much excitement demanded some kind of outward expression and he didn’t want to cry.”

— Sally Rooney

269. “He writes these things down, long run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses, sometimes connected with breathless semicolons, as if he wants to recreate a precise copy of Marianne in print, as if he can preserve her completely for future review. Then he turns a new page in the notebook so he doesn’t have to look at what he’s done.”

— Sally Rooney

270. “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

271. “It’s possible to feel so grateful that you can’t get to sleep at night.”

— Sally Rooney

272. “I know you don’t like to see upset by things. But it’s not a sign of weakness to have feelings.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

274. “I explained that I wanted to destroy capitalism and that I considered masculinity personally oppressive. Nick told me he was ‘basically’ a Marxist, and he didn’t want me to judge him for owning a house. It’s this or paying rent forever, he said. But I acknowledge it’s troubling.”

— Sally Rooney

275. “Committee members of college clubs, who are dressed up in black tie very frequently, and who inexplicably believe that the internal workings of student societies are interesting to normal people.”

— Sally Rooney

276. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

278. “He can’t help Marianne, no matter what he does. There’s something frightening about her, some huge emptiness in the pit of her being. It’s like waiting for a lift to arrive and when the doors open nothing is there, just the terrible dark emptiness of the elevator shaft, on and on forever. 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

279. “It was a relationship, and also not a relationship. Each of our gestures felt spontaneous, and if from the outside we resembled a couple, that was an interesting coincidence for us. We developed a joke about it, which was meaningless to everyone including ourselves: what is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation?”

— Sally Rooney

280. “All my mania for culture, for ‘really good’ things, for knowing about jazz recordings and red wine and Danish furniture, even about Keats and Shakespeare and James Baldwin, what if it’s all a form of vanity, or even worse, a little bandage over the initial wound of my origins?”

— Sally Rooney

281. “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

282. “I thought you’d forgotten all about me. The idea of forgetting anything about you is kind of horrifying.”

— Sally Rooney

283. “She eats this exact breakfast regularly. Lately she has started to eat it slowly, in lavish sugary mouthfuls that congeal around her teeth. The more slowly she eats, and the more consideration she gives to the composition of her food, the less hungry she feels. She won’t eat again until eight or nine in the evening.”

— Sally Rooney

284. “He always reflexively imagined ways to cause himself extreme injury when he was distressed.”

— Sally Rooney

285. “She’s missing some primal instinct, self-defense or self-preservation, which makes other human being comprehensible.”

— Sally Rooney

286. “But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy.”

— Sally Rooney

287. “One of his professors call 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.”

— Sally Rooney

288. “Who even gets married? said Bobbi. It’s sinister. Who wants state apparatuses sustaining their relationship?”

— Sally Rooney

289. “To love under capitalism, you have to love everyone.”

— Sally Rooney

290. “Sometimes she made him laugh, but other days he was taciturn, inscrutable, and after he left she would feel high, nervous, at once energetic and terribly drained.”

— Sally Rooney

291. “It seemed as though what he was really saying was: there’s something beautiful about the way you think and feel, or the way you experience the world is beautiful in some way.”

— Sally Rooney

292. “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. 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.”

— Sally Rooney

293. “I loved when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke that nobody else could understand.”

— Sally Rooney

294. “He did gradually start to wonder why all their classroom discussions were so abstract and lacking in textual detail, and eventually he realised that most people were not actually doing the reading. They were coming into college every day to have heated debates about books they had not read. 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.”

— Sally Rooney

295. “From a young age her life has been abnormal, she knows that. But so much is covered over in time now, the way leaves fall and cover a piece of earth, and eventually mingle with the soil. Things that happened to her then are buried in the earth of her body.”

— Sally Rooney

296. “When we were young, we thought our responsibilities stretched out to encompass the earth and everything that lived on it.”

— Sally Rooney

297. “Traditional marriage was obviously not fit for purpose, and almost ubiquitously ended in one kind of failure or another, but at least it was an effort at something, and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life.”

— Sally Rooney

298. “Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.”

— Sally Rooney

299. “People can really change one another. You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”

— Sally Rooney

300. “Soon she will be packing things into suitcases: woolen jumpers, skirts, her two silk dresses. A set of teacups and saucers patterned with flowers. A hairdryer, a frying pan, four white cotton towels. A coffeepot. The objects of a new existence.”

— Sally Rooney