Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 8 of 10

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

— Sally Rooney

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

366. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

379. “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

380. “Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn’t make him happy.”

— Sally Rooney

381. “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

382. “This “what?” question seems to him to contain so much: not just forensic attentiveness to his silence that allows her to ask in first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them.”

— Sally Rooney

383. “It’s not that I get off on being degraded as such, she says. I just like to know that I would degrade myself for someone if they wanted me too. Does that make sense? I don’t know if it does, I’ve been thinking about it. It’s about dynamic, more than what actually happens.”

— Sally Rooney

384. “When I was younger, I think what I wanted was to travel the world, to lead a glamorous life, to be celebrated for my work, to marry a great intellectual, to reject everything I had been raised with, to cut myself off from the narrow world. I feel very embarrassed by all that now, but I was lonely and unhappy, and I didn’t understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness.”

— Sally Rooney

385. “When we see each other after all these emails I’m going to get very shy and hide my head under my wing like a little bird.”

— Sally Rooney

386. “I sat on the floor of my room bleeding into a rolled-up piece of tissue paper and thinking about my own death. I was like an empty cup, which Nick had emptied out, and now I had to look at what had spilled out of me: all my delusional beliefs about my own value.”

— Sally Rooney

387. “Marianne was so totally uninterested in what people thought of her, so extremely secure in her own self-perception, that it was hard to imagine her caring for attention one way or another. She did not altogether, as far as Connell knew, actually like herself, but praise from other people seemed as irrelevant to her as disapproval had been in school.”

— Sally Rooney

388. “He often makes blithe remarks about things he ‘wishes’.”

— Sally Rooney

389. “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

390. “I just feel like our relationship is very one-way. Like he’s always fixing things for me and I never fix anything for him. I mean, it’s great that he’s so helpful. And I need that, in a way. But he doesn’t need anything back from me.”

— Sally Rooney

391. “Of course if we all stay alone and practise celibacy and carefully police our personal boundaries, many problems will be avoided, but it seems we will also have almost nothing left that makes life worthwhile.”

— Sally Rooney

392. “I never feel lonely when I’m with you.”

— Sally Rooney

393. “I just don’t care what they think about ordinary people. As far as I’m concerned they’re speaking from a false position when they speak about that. Why don’t they write about the kind of lives they really lead, and the kind of things that really obsess them? Why do they pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism – when really they’re obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in the New York Times?”

— Sally Rooney

394. “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

395. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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