Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

352. “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

353. “Maybe eventually we will just drop out of each other’s lives, or become friends after all, or something else. But whatever happens will at least be the result of this experiment, which feels at times like it’s going badly wrong, and at other times feels like the only kind of relationship worth having.”

— Sally Rooney

354. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

356. “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

357. “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

358. “When he talks to Marianne he has a sense of total privacy between them. He could tell her anything about himself, even weird things, and she would never repeat them, he knows that. Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life then closing it behind him. He’s not frightened of her, she’s pretty relaxed person, but he fears being around her, because of the confusing way he finds himself behaving, the things he says that would never ordinarily say.”

— Sally Rooney

359. “Still, he would lie down and die for her at any minute, which is the only thing he knows about himself that makes him feel like a worthwhile person.”

— Sally Rooney

360. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

362. “The sky was a thrilling chlorine-blue, stretched taut and featureless like silk.”

— Sally Rooney

363. “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

364. “People can really change one another.”

— Sally Rooney

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

368. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “I try to be nice to you, he says, but you always throw it back at me. She doesn’t think that’s true, but she knows he probably thinks it is.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

375. “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

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. “He carried the secret around like something large and hot, like an overfull tray of hot drinks that he had to carry everywhere and never spill.”

— Sally Rooney

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “I’m bettering myself, I thought. I’m going to become so smart that no one will understand me.”

— Sally Rooney

382. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

385. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

391. “Sometimes when I get really sad and depressed, you know, I lie in bed and think about you. I don’t mean in a sexual way. I just think about the goodness of you as a person. And since you like me, or you love me, I must be okay.”

— Sally Rooney

392. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney