Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive.”

— Sally Rooney

352. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

361. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

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

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

— Sally Rooney

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

392. “He can’t help Marianne, no matter what he does. There’s something frightening about her, some huge emptiness in the pit of her being.”

— Sally Rooney

393. “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

394. “He’s not sure what friends are allowed to enjoy about eachother.”

— Sally Rooney

395. “There’s something frightening about her, some huge emptiness in the pit of her being. It’s like waiting for a lift to arrive and when the doors open nothing is there, just the terrible dark emptiness of the elevator shaft, on and on forever.”

— Sally Rooney

396. “I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born as the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us. Or maybe it was just the end of one civilisation, ours, and at some point in the future another will take its place. In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.”

— Sally Rooney

397. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

399. “We can’t change your circumstances, but we can change how you respond to your circumstances.”

— 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