Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Well, but the time is more real. Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct.”

— Sally Rooney

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

305. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “The idea of forgetting anything about you is kind of horrifying to me.”

— Sally Rooney

324. “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

325. “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

326. “And I do wonder why I’ve spent all this time feeling depressed about the end of something that wasn’t working anyway.”

— Sally Rooney

327. “But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it? I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy, except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing. And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.”

— Sally Rooney

328. “If you ever touch Marianne again, I’ll kill you, he says. Okay? That’s all. Say one bad thing to her ever again and I’ll come back here myself and kill you, that’s it. It seems to Connell, though he can’t see or hear very well, that Alan is now crying. Do you understand me? Connell says. Say yes or no. Alan says: Yes. Connell turns around, walks out the front door and closes it behind him.”

— Sally Rooney

329. “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

330. “Our ways of thinking and speaking about sexuality seem so limited, compared to the exhausting and debilitating power of sexuality itself as we experience it in our real lives.”

— Sally Rooney

331. “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

332. “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

333. “She has no idea that she is, in this small limited respect, quite literally insane, because everyone around her is insane in exactly the same way. They really cannot tell the difference between someone they have heard of, and someone they personally know.”

— Sally Rooney

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”

— Sally Rooney

339. “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

340. “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

341. “He feels ambivalent about this, as if it’s disloyal of him, because maybe he’s enjoying how she looks or some physical aspect of her closeness. He’s not sure what friends are allowed to enjoy about each other.”

— Sally Rooney

342. “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

343. “Walking around, even on a bad day, I would see things – I mean just the things that were in front of me. People’s faces, the weather, traffic. The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on, completely ordinary things. 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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

346. “Maybe certain kinds of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person’s sense of self permanently. Like the way I didn’t lose my virginity until I was twenty and it was so painful and awkward and bad, and since then I’ve always felt like exactly the kind of person that would happen to, even though before then I didn’t.”

— Sally Rooney

347. “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

348. “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

349. “These cells may look fairly normal, but they are not.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney