Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “People are a lot more knowable than they think they are.”

— Sally Rooney

402. “You underestimate your own power so you don’t have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. You tell yourself stories about it. Oh well, Bobbi’s rich, Nick’s a man, I can’t hurt these people. If anything they’re out to hurt me and I’m defending myself.”

— Sally Rooney

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

406. “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

407. “She pronounced Liese’s name without any particular love or hatred, just a girl she had known, and for months afterwards, maybe forever afterwards, I was afraid that someday she would say my name that way too.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

410. “He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance.”

— Sally Rooney

411. “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

412. “But so much is covered over in time now, the way leaves fall and cover a piece of earth, and eventually mingle with the soil.”

— Sally Rooney

413. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

415. “Multiple times he has tried writing his thoughts about Marianne down on paper in an effort to make sense of them. He’s moved by a desire to describe in words exactly how she looks and speaks. Her hair and clothing. The copy of Swann’s Way she reads at lunchtime in the school cafeteria, with a dark French painting on the cover and a mint-colored spine. Her long fingers turning the pages.”

— Sally Rooney

416. “People can really change one another.”

— Sally Rooney

417. “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

418. “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

419. “Connell doesn’t read the campus papers much, but he has still managed to hear about the debating society inviting a neo-Nazi to give a speech. It’s all over social media. There was even an article in The Irish Times. Connell hasn’t commented on any of the Facebook threads, but has liked several comments calling for the invite to be rescinded, which is probably the most strident political action he has ever taken in his life.”

— Sally Rooney

420. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

422. “I didn’t feel with her, like I did with many other people, that while I was talking she was just preparing the next thing she wanted to say.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

424. “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

425. “You know I love you. He didn’t say anything else. She said she loved him too and he nodded and continued driving as if nothing at all had happened, which in a way it hadn’t.”

— Sally Rooney

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

432. “She was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed.”

— Sally Rooney

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

436. “Marianne takes significant personal pleasure in having her pain validated by professionals.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

438. “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

439. “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

440. “But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

442. “All my filial duties are nothing but a series of rituals on my part designed to shield myself from criticism while giving nothing of myself away.”

— Sally Rooney

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “One does not think of you as a corporeal being really, but as a beam of pure intellect. And how I wish I had a little more of your radiance illuminating my life at the moment.”

— Sally Rooney

448. “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

449. “Standing in this house was like watching someone familiar smile at me, but with missing teeth.”

— Sally Rooney

450. “There’s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love.”

— Sally Rooney