Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 9 of 10

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

— Sally Rooney

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “I never feel lonely when I’m with you.”

— Sally Rooney

417. “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

418. “It was so much harder to reconcile herself to the idea of helping a few, like she would rather help no one than do something so small and feeble, but that wasn’t it either.”

— Sally Rooney

419. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

421. “He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her.”

— Sally Rooney

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

426. “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

427. “But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy.”

— Sally Rooney

428. “If two people make each other happy then it’s working.”

— Sally Rooney

429. “Marianne is neither admired nor reviled anymore. People have forgotten about her. She’s a normal person now. She walks by and no one looks up. She swims in the college pool, eats in the Dining Hall with damp hair, walks around the cricket pitch in the evening.”

— Sally Rooney

430. “You have a soothing effect on me. You know, the things I would normally worry about, they don’t really seem that worrying when I talk to you.”

— Sally Rooney

431. “Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence?”

— Sally Rooney

432. “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 and my pretensions to being a kind of person I wasn’t. While I was full of these things I couldn’t see them. Now that I was nothing, only an empty glass, I could see everything about myself.”

— Sally Rooney

433. “But, I think more importantly, great novels engage my sympathies and make me desire things.”

— Sally Rooney

434. “Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life?”

— Sally Rooney

435. “If we have to go to our deaths for the greater good of humankind, I will accept that like a lamb, because I haven’t deserved this life or even enjoyed it.”

— Sally Rooney

436. “Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure in his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.”

— Sally Rooney

437. “Just look at what conservatives make of the environment: their idea of conservation is to extract, pillage and destroy, ‘because that’s what we’ve always done’ – but because of that very fact, it’s no longer the same earth we do it to.”

— Sally Rooney

438. “E penso che se credessi in Dio, non vorrei prostrarmi davanti a lui per chiedergli perdono. Vorrei solo ringraziarlo ogni giorno, per tutto.”

— Sally Rooney

439. “She’s tired of making evasive efforts when it’s easier, effortless, to give in.”

— Sally Rooney

440. “In other words, she’s a nice person, and Connell is beginning to understand that he actually likes nice people, that he even wants to be one.”

— Sally Rooney

441. “Alice, I think I’ve also experienced that sensation you had in the convenience shop. For me it feels like looking down and seeing for the first time that I’m standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying vertical height, and the only thing supporting my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on earth.”

— Sally Rooney

442. “Walking around, even on a bad day, I would see things – I mean just the things that were in front of me. People’s faces, the weather, traffic. The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on, completely ordinary things. And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them. There was something delicate about living like that – like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.”

— Sally Rooney

443. “Every subsequent hour since I saw him has been worse than the last.”

— Sally Rooney

444. “He gives a short, unhappy laugh.”

— Sally Rooney

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “How graceful she looked in the crowd, his eyes followed her, her long beautiful neck, her shoulders gleaming in the sunlight. Like watching his life walk away from him.”

— Sally Rooney

449. “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

450. “I love you, alright? She had a strange, dazed look on her face as she listened, holding her hand to her cheek. Even though I’m a psychiatric case, she said. He laughed, standing upright and closing the door behind him. Yeah, he answered. Even though we both are.”

— Sally Rooney