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

351. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

357. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

370. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

373. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “Something seemed to close up over my body, like a hand held hard over my mouth or my eyes. couldn’t begin to phrase the explanation of what the doctor had told me, because there were so many parts to it, and it would take so long, and involve so many individual words and sentences. The thought of saying so many words about it made me feel physically sick.”

— Sally Rooney

389. “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

390. “On nights out his friends sometimes raise the subject of his father, like it’s something deep and meaningful they can only talk about when they’re drunk. Connell finds this depressing.”

— Sally Rooney

391. “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

392. “It depressed her to think people were so predictable.”

— Sally Rooney

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

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. “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

398. “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

399. “I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body. I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived.”

— Sally Rooney

400. “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