Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “The sky was a thrilling chlorine-blue, stretched taut and featureless like silk.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

362. “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

363. “To think of childhood gave her a funny queasy feeling, because it had been real life once and now it was something else. The old people had died, the babies had grown old.”

— Sally Rooney

364. “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

365. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

387. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us.”

— Sally Rooney

393. “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

394. “I’m sorry to say that I think it is too late to change the way we have turned out. The turning-out process has come to an end, and we are to a very great extent what we are.”

— Sally Rooney

395. “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

396. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

398. “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

399. “All my mania for culture, for ‘really good’ things, for knowing about jazz recordings and red wine and Danish furniture, even about Keats and Shakespeare and James Baldwin, what if it’s all a form of vanity, or even worse, a little bandage over the initial wound of my origins?”

— Sally Rooney

400. “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