Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Most of our attempts throughout human history to describe the difference between right and wrong have been feeble and cruel and unjust, but that the difference still remains- beyond ourselves, beyond each specific culture, beyond every individual person who has ever lived or died, And we spend our lives trying to know that difference and to live by it, trying to love other people instead of hating them, and there is nothing else that matters on the earth.”

— Sally Rooney

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

307. “The scholarships offer five years of paid tuition, free accommodation on campus, and meals in the Dining Hall every evening with the other scholars. For Marianne, who doesn’t pay her own rent or tuition and has no real concept of how much these things cost, it’s just a matter of reputation. She would like her superior intellect to be affirmed in public by the transfer of large amounts of money.”

— Sally Rooney

308. “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

309. “It expresses everything all at once, which is the same as expressing nothing.”

— Sally Rooney

310. “He kisses her closed eyelids. It’s not like this with other people, she says. Yeah, he says. I know. She senses there are things he isn’t saying to her. She can’t tell whether he’s holding back a desire to pull away from her, or a desire to make himself more vulnerable somehow. He kisses her neck. Her eyes are getting heavy. I think we’ll be fine, he says. She doesn’t know or can’t remember what he’s talking about. She falls asleep.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

312. “It’s amazing. When I first started going around talking about Marxism, people laughed at me. Now it’s everyone’s thing. And to all these new people trying to make communism cool, I would just like to say, welcome aboard, comrades. No hard feelings. The future is bright for the working class.”

— Sally Rooney

313. “She feels that even she doesn’t know what her family are like, that she’s never adequate in her attempts to describe them, that she oscillates between exaggerating their behaviour, which makes her feel guilty, or downplaying it, which also makes her feel guilty, but a different guilt, more inwardly directed.”

— Sally Rooney

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

317. “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

318. “Is life so much worse here 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.”

— Sally Rooney

319. “By refusing to admit that I was sick, I felt I could keep the sickness outside time and space, something only in my own head. If other people knew about it, the sickness would become real and I would have to spend my life being a sick person.”

— Sally Rooney

320. “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

321. “I didn’t feel with her, like I did with many other people, that while I was talking she was just preparing the next thing she wanted to say.”

— Sally Rooney

322. “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

323. “It’s so hard to see the point sometimes, when the things in life I think are meaningful turn out to mean nothing, and the people who are supposed to love me don’t.”

— Sally Rooney

324. “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

325. “A certain peace had come to me and I wondered if it was God’s doing after all. 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

326. “Connell doesn’t read the campus papers much, but he has still managed to hear about the debating society inviting a neo-Nazi to give a speech. It’s all over social media. There was even an article in The Irish Times. Connell hasn’t commented on any of the Facebook threads, but has liked several comments calling for the invite to be rescinded, which is probably the most strident political action he has ever taken in his life.”

— Sally Rooney

327. “He didn’t call me the next day, or the day after that. Nobody did. Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen. I applied for jobs and turned up for seminars. Things went on.”

— Sally Rooney

328. “For weeks now she has had this feeling, the feeling of moving around inside a protective film, floating like mercury. The outside world touches against her outside skin, but not the other part of herself, inside.”

— Sally Rooney

329. “This seemed like a strange thing to happen to him, unpleasant on the surface level, but also interesting in a way, as if his life was taking a new direction.”

— Sally Rooney

330. “It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he’s trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him.”

— Sally Rooney

331. “She felt so intelligent and young and powerful that she almost could have achieved such a thing, and now she knew she wasn’t at all powerful.”

— Sally Rooney

332. “How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive.”

— Sally Rooney

333. “He often makes blithe remarks about things he ‘wishes’. I wish you didn’t have to go, he says when she’s leaving, or: I wish you could stay the night. If he really wished any of those things, Marianne knows, then they would happen. Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn’t make him happy.”

— Sally Rooney

334. “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

335. “Dwelling on the sight of Connell’s face always gives Marianne a certain pleasure, which can be inflected with any number of other feelings depending on the minute interplay of conversation and mood. His appearance is like a favourite piece of music to her, sounding a little different each time she hears it.”

— Sally Rooney

336. “Well, it depends whether you believe in some kind of transhistorical concept of romantic love consistent across diverse cultures, said Bobbi. But I guess we all believe silly things, don’t we?”

— Sally Rooney

337. “It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

339. “Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

341. “The sky was a thrilling chlorine-blue, stretched taut and featureless like silk.”

— Sally Rooney

342. “Time softens out while he types, feeling slow and dilated while actually passing very rapidly, and more than once he’s looked up to find that hours have gone by.”

— Sally Rooney

343. “You could have a different boyfriend, you know, he says. I mean, guys are constantly falling in love with you, from what I hear. Stop that. You’re the kind of person, people either love you or hate you.”

— Sally Rooney

344. “I was going through a second upbringing: learning a new set of assumptions, and feigning a greater level of understanding than I really possessed.”

— Sally Rooney

345. “Somehow he was expressing more emotion than at any time in his life before, while simultaneously feeling less, feeling nothing.”

— Sally Rooney

346. “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

347. “What if I’m the one who can’t let myself be happy? Because I’m scared, or I prefer to wallow in self-pity, or I don’t believe I deserve good things.”

— Sally Rooney

348. “But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.”

— Sally Rooney

349. “I need to be fun and likeable, I thought. A fun person would send a thank-you email.”

— Sally Rooney

350. “Marianne takes significant personal pleasure in having her pain validated by professionals.”

— Sally Rooney