Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Things that are over aren’t the same as things that never happened.”

— Sally Rooney

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

271. “I started keeping a diary, which I called ‘the life book’. I began with the idea of writing one short entry each day, just a line or two, describing something good. I suppose by ‘good’ I must have meant something that made me happy or brought me pleasure.”

— Sally Rooney

272. “She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional feigned embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to ‘make a big deal’.”

— Sally Rooney

273. “My ego had always been an issue. I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was. When I couldn’t make friends as a child, I fantasised that I was smarter than all my teachers, smarter than any other student who had been in the school before, a genius hidden among normal people.”

— Sally Rooney

274. “No one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy.”

— Sally Rooney

275. “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

276. “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

277. “You think you’re the kind of person who can deal with something and then it happens and you realize you can’t.”

— Sally Rooney

278. “Though I knew that I would eventually have to enter full-time employment, I certainly never fantasized about a radiant future where I was paid to perform an economic role. Sometimes this felt like a failure to take an interest in my own life, which depressed me.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

280. “In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love. – FRANK O’HARA.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

283. “Well here I am on the floor he thought, is life really so much worse here on the floor than it would be on the bed or even in a totally different location. No, life is exactly the same, 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 into my lungs gradually feeling my right arm go numb under the weight of my body because it’s essentially the same as every other experience.”

— Sally Rooney

284. “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

285. “Really my problem is that I’m annoyed at everyone else for not having all the answers, when I also have none. And who am I to ask for humility and openness from other people?”

— Sally Rooney

286. “Marianne feels aggrieved that she fell for it, aggrieved that she thought she had anything in common with them, that she’d participated in the commodity market they passed off as friendship.”

— Sally Rooney

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “Well, but the time is more real. Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct.”

— Sally Rooney

291. “Tempted by the idea of multiple partners? she says. He looks at her. She has an arch expression on her face. Uh, he says. I don’t know. What do you mean? Do you not fantasise about having your own harem? says Peggy. I thought that was a universal thing for men. Oh, right. No, not really.”

— Sally Rooney

292. “She sits at her dressing table looking at her face in the mirror. Her face lacks definition around the cheeks and jaw. It’s a face like a piece of technology, and her two eyes are cursors blinking. Or it’s reminiscent of the moon reflected in something, wobbly and oblique. It expresses everything all at once, which is the same as expressing nothing.”

— Sally Rooney

293. “You know, I still have that impulse to be available to you.”

— Sally Rooney

294. “It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”

— Sally Rooney

295. “Something being over is not the same as something never having happened.”

— Sally Rooney

296. “He presses his hands down slightly further into his pockets, as if trying to store his entire body in his pockets all at once.”

— Sally Rooney

297. “After the library closes in the evening he walks back to her apartment, maybe picking up some food or a four-euro bottle of wine on the way. When the weather is good, the sky feels miles away, and birds wheel through limitless air and light overhead. When it rains, the city closes in, gathers around with mists; cars move slower, their headlights glowing darkly, and the faces that pass are pink with cold.”

— Sally Rooney

298. “I know we agree that civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us.”

— Sally Rooney

299. “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

300. “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