Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “Hi Frances, said Melissa’s voice. I said hello, though what I meant was: I hope you haven’t found out about me sleeping with your husband.”

— Sally Rooney

403. “Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything. 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 inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.”

— Sally Rooney

404. “I could see that he was trying to catch my eye and that if I returned his gaze he would give me a kind of apologetic expression. I found this idea too intense to think about, like the glare of a bare lightbulb.”

— Sally Rooney

405. “I was glad the poems were only ever performed and never published. They floated away ethereally to the sound of applause. Real writers, and also painters, had to keep on looking at the ugly things they had done for good. I hated that everything I did was so ugly, but also that I lacked the courage to confront how ugly it was.”

— Sally Rooney

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

409. “And if in the silence and solitude of his room he kneels down on the floorboards, is he praying? And for what? To be free of selfish desires – maybe. Or maybe with his elbows on the mattress, his hands clasped before him, he is only thinking: What do you want from me? Please God show me what you want.”

— Sally Rooney

410. “It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasised to fill the emptiness left by religion.”

— Sally Rooney

411. “Sometimes this felt like a failure to take an interest in my own life, which depressed me. On the other hand, I felt that my disinterest in wealth was ideologically healthy.”

— Sally Rooney

412. “Jesus emphasized the necessity of loving others without regard to our own self interest. In a way, when we love fictional characters, know that they can never love us in return, is that not a method of practicing in miniature the kind of personally disinterested love to which Jesus calls us? I mean that sympathetic engagement is a form of desire with an object but without a subject a way of wanting without wanting; desiring for others not what I want for myself but the way I want for myself.”

— Sally Rooney

413. “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

414. “Sometimes she felt like saying: Would you miss me, if you didn’t have me anymore? She had asked him that once on the ghost estate, when they were just kids. He had said yes then, but she’d been the only thing in his life at that time, the only thing he had to himself, and it would never be that way again.”

— Sally Rooney

415. “As a twenty-three-year-old Marianne is occasionally subject to the same dismal anxieties that characterised her adolescent life. Throughout school she was contemptuous of others, but simultaneously seized by a fear of other people’s contempt.”

— Sally Rooney

416. “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

417. “People who intentionally become famous – I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it – are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill.”

— Sally Rooney

418. “Dry upturned sycamore leaves scuttling like claws along the South Circular Road. The artificial buttered taste of popcorn in the cinema. Pale-yellow sky in the evening, Thomas Street draped in mist.”

— Sally Rooney

419. “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

420. “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

421. “I fixated on perceived wrongs Nick had done to me, callous things he had said or implied, so that I could hate him and therefore justify the intensity of my feelings for him as pure hatred.”

— Sally Rooney

422. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

424. “The whole time we were together, why didn’t you tell me any of this? I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t want you to think I was damaged or something. I was probably afraid you wouldn’t want me anymore.”

— Sally Rooney

425. “Was “kindness” just another term for submission in the face of conflict?”

— Sally Rooney

426. “They just move through the world in a different way, and he’ll probably never really understand them, and he knows they will never understand him, or even try.”

— Sally Rooney

427. “If he’s nice to you I will approve of him unconditionally, and if he’s not then I’ll be his enemy forever. Does that sound reasonable? But I’m sure he’ll be nice.”

— Sally Rooney

428. “Really my problem is that I’m annoyed at everyone else for not having all the answers, when I also have none. And who am I to ask for humility and openness from other people?”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

430. “He’s amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it “the pleasure of being touched by great art.”

— Sally Rooney

431. “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

432. “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

433. “Is this how it’s going to be for the rest of our lives? Time dissolving into thick dark fog, things that happened last week seeming years ago, and things that happened last year feeling like yesterday. I hope this is a side effect of lockdown and not simply a consequence of growing older.”

— Sally Rooney

434. “He’s doing it partly out of guilt. A week previously Marianne gave him head in his apartment and complained afterwards that her jaw hurt, and he was like, do you have to complain about everything all the time?”

— Sally Rooney

435. “Anyways I suggested it to him, that I could try being more submissive. And it turns out he likes to beat me up.”

— Sally Rooney

436. “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

437. “I thought it would be the same as everything else in my life – difficult and sad – because I was a difficult and sad person. But that’s not what I am anymore, if I ever was. 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

438. “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

439. “Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she’s aware of this now, while it’s happening.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

441. “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

442. “We’ve been apart for too long, she said. We’re shy with each other now.”

— Sally Rooney

443. “Hi, he said. How could his feeling for her ever be anything like his feeling for other people? But part of the feeling was knowing the terrible hold he’d had over her, and still had, and could not foresee ever losing.”

— Sally Rooney

444. “It’s like something he assumed was just a painted backdrop all his life has revealed itself to be real: foreign cities are real, and famous artworks, and underground railway systems, and remnants of the Berlin Wall. That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

446. “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

447. “We can’t conserve anything, and especially not social relations, without altering their nature, arresting some part of their interaction with time in an unnatural way. 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

448. “At the moment, the cycle of insincere public apologies is probably making everyone suspicious of forgiveness. But what should people who have done terrible things in the past actually do? Spontaneously advertise their own sins in order to pre-empt public exposure? Just try never to accomplish anything that might bring them increased scrutiny of any kind?”

— Sally Rooney

449. “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

450. “Supongo que todo el mundo es un misterio en cierto modo, dice al fin, Es decir, nunca puedes conocer del todo a otra persona.”

— Sally Rooney