Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

354. “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

355. “Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing.”

— Sally Rooney

356. “He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance.”

— Sally Rooney

357. “All my feelings and experiences were in one sense extremely intense, and in another sense completely trivial, because none of my decisions seemed to have any consequences, and nothing about my life – the job, the apartment, the desires, the love affairs – struck me as permanent.”

— Sally Rooney

358. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

360. “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

361. “Maybe that’s why middle-aged people always think their thoughts and feelings are more important than those of young people, because they can only weakly remember the feelings of their youth while allowing their present experiences to dominate their life outlook.”

— Sally Rooney

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “You underestimate your own power so you don’t have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. You tell yourself stories about it. Oh well, Bobbi’s rich, Nick’s a man, I can’t hurt these people. If anything they’re out to hurt me and I’m defending myself.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

369. “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.”

— Sally Rooney

370. “She pronounced Liese’s name without any particular love or hatred, just a girl she had known, and for months afterwards, maybe forever afterwards, I was afraid that someday she would say my name that way too.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “I feel so frightened of being hurt – not of the suffering, which I know I can handle, but the indignity of being open to it.”

— Sally Rooney

376. “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

377. “It’s funny the decisions you make when you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different.”

— Sally Rooney

378. “I suppose I was seeing but not looking – the visual world just came to me flat, like a catalogue of information. I never looked at things anymore, in the way I had before.”

— Sally Rooney

379. “One does not think of you as a corporeal being really, but as a beam of pure intellect. And how I wish I had a little more of your radiance illuminating my life at the moment.”

— Sally Rooney

380. “People are a lot more knowable than they think they are.”

— Sally Rooney

381. “There’s a Kanye West song playing, the one with the Curtis Mayfield sample.”

— Sally Rooney

382. “I sat on the campus cricket pitch on my own and smoked two cigarettes, one after another. I had a headache, I hadn’t eaten. My body felt used up and worthless to me. I didn’t want to put any food or medicine into it anymore.”

— Sally Rooney

383. “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

384. “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

385. “There are worse things than getting beaten up.”

— Sally Rooney

386. “She was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed.”

— Sally Rooney

387. “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

388. “They took her radical politics as a kind of bourgeois self-deprecation, nothing very serious, and talked to her about restaurants or where to stay in Rome.”

— Sally Rooney

389. “For weeks now she has had this feeling, the feeling of moving around inside a protective film, floating like mercury.”

— Sally Rooney

390. “It’s something to do with capitalism, she said. Yeah. Everything is, that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

— Sally Rooney

391. “On dry days, Bobbi and I walked along underused paths, kicking leaves and talking about things like the idea of landscape painting. Bobbi thought the fetishization of untouched nature was intrinsically patriarchal and nationalistic. “I like like houses better than fields,” I observed. “They’re more poetic, because they have people in them.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

393. “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.”

— Sally Rooney

394. “It depressed her to think people were so predictable.”

— Sally Rooney

395. “I felt anything was possible, that there were no doors shut behind me, and that out there somewhere, as yet unknown, there were people who would love and admire me and want to make me happy. Maybe that explains in some way the openness I felt toward the world – maybe without knowing it, I was anticipating my future, I was watching for signs.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

397. “The problem with museums like the d’Orsay, by the way and just totally incidentally, is that there’s far too much art, so that no matter how well you plan your route or how noble your intentions, you will always find yourself walking irritably past priceless works of profound genius looking for the bathrooms. And you feel slightly cheapened afterwards, like you’ve let yourself down – at least I do.”

— Sally Rooney

398. “There’s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

400. “Maybe they were just curious to observe the chemistry between two people who, over the course of several years, apparently could not leave one another alone.”

— Sally Rooney