Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “He left the room then but he could hear his mother laughing as he went up the stairs. His life is always giving her amusement.”

— Sally Rooney

302. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

304. “Still, he would lie down and die for her at any minute, which is the only thing he knows about himself that makes him feel like a worthwhile person.”

— Sally Rooney

305. “I had wanted Melissa to take an interest in me and I was’t even sure I liked her. I didn’t have the option not to take her seriously, because she had published a book, which proved that lots of other people took her seriously even if I didn’t. At twenty-one, I had no achievements or possessions that proved I was a serious person.”

— Sally Rooney

306. “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

307. “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

308. “Tillerson out of state lmaoooo.”

— Sally Rooney

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasised to fill the emptiness left by religion.”

— Sally Rooney

313. “I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better.”

— Sally Rooney

314. “I have to laugh now or I’m going to start crying.”

— 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. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “Marianne felt a relief so high and sudden that it was almost like panic.”

— Sally Rooney

321. “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

322. “It’s as if an impossibly heavy lid has been lifted off his emotional life and suddenly he can breathe fresh air. It is physically possible to type and send a message reading: I love you! It had never seemed possible before, not remotely, but in fact it’s easy. Of course if someone saw the messages he would be embarrassed, but he knows now that this is a normal kind of embarrassment, an almost protective impulse towards a particularly good part of life.”

— Sally Rooney

323. “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

324. “He reaches for her hand and she gives it to him without thinking. For a second he holds it, his thumb moving over her knuckles. Then he lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses it. She feels pleasurably crushed under the weight of his power over her, the vast ecstatic depth of her will to please him. That’s nice, she says. He nods. She feels a low gratifying ache inside her body, in her pelvic bone, in her back.”

— Sally Rooney

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

328. “And I think the space in my life has been cleared out at this stage, and it’s empty, and maybe for that reason it’s time for me to fall in love again. I need to feel that my life has some kind of centre, somewhere for my thoughts to return and rest. I know, by the way, that most people don’t need any such thing, and I would be much healthier if I didn’t.”

— Sally Rooney

329. “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

330. “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

331. “Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically.”

— Sally Rooney

332. “My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all. If he left my line of sight for more than a few seconds, I couldn’t even remember what his face looked like.”

— Sally Rooney

333. “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

334. “When they drew apart Connell looked her in the eyes and said: I love you. She was laughing then, and her face was red. She was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed.”

— Sally Rooney

335. “Really, my problem is that I’m annoyed at everyone else for not having all the answers, when I also have none.”

— Sally Rooney

336. “He doesn’t even have to think about it, because he feels it: its syntax seems to have originated inside him.”

— Sally Rooney

337. “Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive – because we were so stupid about each other.”

— Sally Rooney

338. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

340. “When she touches him spontaneously, applying a little pressure to his arm, or even reaching to brush a piece of lint off his collar, he feels a rush of pride, and hopes that people are watching them.”

— Sally Rooney

341. “In the bed across the ward someone is coughing.”

— Sally Rooney

342. “She was attuned to the presence of his body in a microscopic way.”

— Sally Rooney

343. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

345. “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

346. “On the platform of a train station, late morning, early June: two women embracing after a separation of several months.”

— Sally Rooney

347. “Emotionally, I saw myself as a smooth, hard little ball. He couldn’t get purchase on me. I just rolled away.”

— Sally Rooney

348. “It’s hard to know whether Marianne likes to hear those things; she desires to hear them, but she’s conscious by now of being able to desire in some sense what she does not want.”

— Sally Rooney

349. “I thought it would be the same as everything else in my life – difficult and sad – because I was a difficult and sad person. But that’s not what I am anymore, if I ever was. And life is more changeable than I thought. I mean a life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy. It’s not just one thing or another – it doesn’t get fixed into a groove called ‘personality’ and then run along that way until the end.”

— Sally Rooney

350. “She hung up on me. Afterwards I lay on my bed feeling like a light had been switched off.”

— Sally Rooney