Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Marianne felt a relief so high and sudden that it was almost like panic.”

— Sally Rooney

352. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

354. “I know we agree that civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life. Cars are ugly, buildings are ugly, mass-produced disposable consumer goods are unspeakably ugly. The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us.”

— Sally Rooney

355. “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

356. “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

357. “How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

359. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “I sat staring at my laptop screen until it went black. Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought. I need to relax and let things go. I should experiment with drugs. These thoughts were not unusual for me.”

— Sally Rooney

368. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

375. “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

376. “People can really change one another.”

— Sally Rooney

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

386. “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

387. “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

388. “I think I would feel superficially sadder, but less fundamentally broken as a person, if I could just be sad about one break-up, rather than sad about my lifelong inability to sustain a meaningful relationship.”

— Sally Rooney

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

397. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney