Top 500 Sally Rooney Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance.”

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

406. “It’s something to do with capitalism, she said. Yeah. Everything is, that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

— Sally Rooney

407. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

409. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

411. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

413. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “And who am I to ask for humility and openness from other people? What have I ever given the world to ask so much in return? I could disintegrate into a heap of dust, for all the world cares, and that’s as it should be.”

— Sally Rooney

428. “As a teenager I thought I would rather die than have babies, and then in my twenties I vaguely assumed it was something that would just happen to me eventually, and now that I’m about to turn thirty, I’m starting to think: well? There isn’t anyone queuing up to help me fulfil this biological function, needless to say. And I also have a weird and completely unexplained suspicion that I might not be fertile. There is no medical reason for me to think this.”

— Sally Rooney

429. “He didn’t reply to that, because he felt as if he had just jumped off a high precipice and fallen to his death, and he was glad to be dead, he never wanted to be alive again.”

— Sally Rooney

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “People can really change one another.”

— Sally Rooney

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

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

— Sally Rooney

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

446. “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

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

— Sally Rooney

448. “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

449. “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

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

— Sally Rooney