Sally Rooney Quotes

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

I like you so much, Marianne said. Connell felt a pleasurable sorrow come over him, which brought him close to tears. Moments of emotional pain arrived like this, meaningless or at least indecipherable. Marianne lived a drastically free life, he could see that. He was trapped by various considerations. He cared what people thought of him. He even cared what Marianne thought, that was obvious now. ~ Sally Rooney

Her eyes fill up with tears again and she closes them. Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she's aware of this now, while it's happening. She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life. ~ Sally Rooney

From a young age her life has been abnormal, she knows that. 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. Things that happened to her then are buried in the earth of her body. ~ Sally Rooney

...our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke which nobody else could understand. ~ Sally Rooney

You need to get straight in your mind what you think a good society would look like, said Marianne. And if you think people should be able to go to college and get English degrees, you shouldn't feel guilty for doing that yourself, because you have every right to. ~ Sally Rooney

People are a lot more knowable than they think they are. ~ Sally Rooney

This, after all, is the literal level on which the incident took place. She asked him to hit her and when he said he didn't want to, she wanted to stop having sex. So why, despite its factual accuracy, does this feel like a dishonest way of narrating what happened? What is the missing element, the excluded part of the story that explains what upset them both? It has something to do with their history, he knows that. Ever since school he has understood his power over her. How she responds to his look or the touch of his hand. The way her face colours, and she goes still as if awaiting some spoken order. His effortless tyranny over someone who seems, to other people, so invulnerable. He has never been able to reconcile himself to the idea of losing this hold over her, like a key to an empty property, left available for future use. In fact he has cultivated it, and he knows he has.
What's left for them, then? There doesn't seem to be a halfway position anymore. Too much has passed between them for that. 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. He could never really want it to. He has sincerely wanted to die, but he has never sincerely wanted Marianne to forget about him. That's the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her. ~ Sally Rooney

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

I like getting compliments where I don't have to make eye contact with the person ~ Sally Rooney

The outside world touches against her outside skin, but not the other part of herself, inside. ~ Sally Rooney

... the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake. ~ Sally Rooney

She closes her eyes. He probably won't come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They've done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
You should go, she says. I'll always be here. You know that. ~ Sally Rooney

Marianne expressed her feelings about Connell mainly in terms of her sustained interest in his opinions and beliefs, the curiosity she feels about his life, and her instinct to survey his thoughts whenever she feels conflicted about anything. ~ Sally Rooney

I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible. ~ Sally Rooney

She spent much of her childhood and adolescence planning elaborate scheme to remove herself from family conflict: staying completely silent, keeping her face and body expressionless and immobile, wordlessly leaving the room and making her way to her bedroom, closing the door quietly behind her. Locking herself in the toilet. Leaving the house for an indefinite number of hours and sitting in the school car park by herself. None of these strategies had ever proven successful. In fact her tactics only seemed to increase the possibility that she would be punished as the primary instigator. ~ Sally Rooney

He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. ~ Sally Rooney

She shrugs. She knows a confrontation is coming now, and she can do nothing to stop it. It's moving towards her already from every direction, and there's no special move she can make, no evasive gesture, that can help her escape it. ~ Sally Rooney

Could he really do the gruesome things he does to her and believe at the same time that he's acting out of love? Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence? ~ Sally Rooney

In bed we talked for hours, conversations that spiralled out from observations into grand, abstract theories and back again. (...) 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

We can sleep together if you want, but you should know I'm only doing it ironically.
​ ~ Sally Rooney

She hung up on me. Afterwards I lay on my bed feeling like a light had been switched off. ~ Sally Rooney

He finds himself rushing to the end of the conversation so they can hang up, and then he can retrospectively savor how much he likes seeing her, without the moment-to-moment pressure of having to produce the right expressions and say the right things. Just to see Helen, her beautiful face, her smile, and to know that she continues loving him, this puts the gift of joy into his day, and for hours he feels nothing but a light-headed happiness. ~ Sally Rooney

They were standing very close. She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted, he knew that. ~ Sally Rooney

She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional feigned embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal'. ~ Sally Rooney

One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma when it seems like Mr Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation. 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'. In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr Knightley kisses Emma's hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is indirect. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them. ~ Sally Rooney

I had the sense that something in my life had ended, my image of myself as a whole or normal person maybe. I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn't make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn't make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would. I thanked my mother for the lift to the station and got out of the car. ~ Sally Rooney

It's time you'll never get back, Marianne adds. I mean, the time is real. The money is also real. Well, but the time is more real. Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct. ~ Sally Rooney

Sometimes she made him laugh, but other days he was taciturn, inscrutable, and after he left she would feel high, nervous, at once energetic and terribly drained. ~ Sally Rooney

You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. ~ Sally Rooney

Her body was all soft and white like flour dough. He seemed to fit perfectly inside her. Physically it just felt right, and he understood why people did insane things for sexual reasons then. ~ Sally Rooney

[She] wonders what it would be like to belong here, to walk down the street greeting people and smiling. To feel that life was happening here, in this place, and not somewhere else far away. ~ Sally Rooney

Bobbi: i don't think 'unemotional' is a quality someone can have
Bobbi: that's like claiming not to have thoughts
me: you live an emotionally intense life so you think everyone else does
me: and if they're not talking about it then they're hiding something
Bobbi: well, ok
Bobbi: we differ on that ~ Sally Rooney

It's always easy to think of reasons not to do something. ~ Sally Rooney

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

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. ~ Sally Rooney

For a few seconds they just stood there in stillness, his arms around her, his breath on her ear. Most people go through their whole lives, Marianne thought, without ever really feeling close to anyone. ~ Sally Rooney

It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he's trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him. ~ Sally Rooney

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

This was probably the most horrifying thing Eric could have said to him, not because it ended his life, but because it didn't. He knew then that the secret for which he had sacrificed his own happiness and the happiness of another person had been trivial all along, and worthless. ~ Sally Rooney

Marianne is so happy for Joanna and Evelyn that she feels lucky even to see them together, even to hear Joanna on the phone to Evelyn saying cheerfully: Okay, I love you, see you later. It gives Marianne a window onto real happiness, though a window she cannot open herself or ever climb through. ~ Sally Rooney

You can love more than one person, she said. That's arguable. Why is it any different from having more than one friend? You're friends with me and you also have other friends, does that mean you don't really value me? I don't have other friends, I said. ~ Sally Rooney

It's as if an impossibly heavy lid has been lifted off his emotional life and suddenly he can breathe fresh air. It is physically possible to type and send a message reading: I love you! It had never seemed possible before, not remotely, but in fact it's easy. Of course if someone saw the messages he would be embarrassed, but he knows now that this is a normal kind of embarrassment, an almost protective impulse towards a particularly good part of life. ~ Sally Rooney

He often makes blithe remarks about things he 'wishes'. I wish you didn't have to go, he says when she's leaving, or: I wish you could stay the night. If he really wished any of those things, Marianne knows, then they would happen. Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn't make him happy. ~ Sally Rooney

All Connell's classmates have identical accents and carry the same size MacBook under their arms. In seminars they express their opinions passionately and conduct impromptu debates. Unable to form such straightforward views or express them with any force, Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority to his fellow students, as if he had upgraded himself accidentally to an intellectual level far above his own, where he had to strain to make sense of the most basic premises. He did gradually start to wonder why all their classroom discussions were so abstract and lacking in textual detail, and eventually he realized that most people were not actually doing the reading. They were coming into college every day to have heated debate about books they had no read. He understand now that his classmates are not like him. It's easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don't worry about appearing ignorant or conceited. They are not stupid people, but they're not so much smarter than him either. 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

If he silently decides not to say something when they're talking, Marianne will ask 'what?' within one or two seconds. This 'what?' question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them. ~ Sally Rooney

In just a few weeks' time Marianne will live with different people, and life will be different. But she herself will not be different. She'll be the same person, trapped inside her own body. There's nowhere she can go that would free her from this. ~ Sally Rooney

She felt happy to be surrounded by people she liked, who liked her. She knew that if she wanted to speak, people would probably turn around and listen out of sincere interest, and that made her happy too, although she had nothing at all to say. ~ Sally Rooney

I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things. Bobbi told me she thought I didn't have a 'real personality', but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterwards think: oh, so that's the kind of person I am. ~ Sally Rooney

My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all. ~ Sally Rooney

Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind him. ~ Sally Rooney

How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not. ~ Sally Rooney

Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head. ~ Sally Rooney

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

No. I was frustrated sometimes but not lonely. I never feel lonely when I'm with you. ~ Sally Rooney

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. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything. ~ Sally Rooney

To me it's weird when animals pause because they seem so intelligent, but maybe that's because I associate pausing with thought. ~ Sally Rooney

Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen. ~ Sally Rooney

Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way. ~ Sally Rooney

It wasn't the first time he'd had the urge to tell Marianne that he loved her, whether or not it was true, but it was the first time he'd given in and said it. He noticed how long it took her to say anything in response, and how her pause had bothered him, as if she might not say it back, and when she did say it he felt better, but maybe that meant nothing. Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example. ~ Sally Rooney

It was a relationship, and also not a relationship. Each of our gestures felt spontaneous, and if from the outside we resembled a couple, that was an interesting coincidence for us. We developed a joke about it, which was meaningless to everyone including ourselves: what is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation? ~ Sally Rooney

Afterward I lay on my side with A Critique of Postcolonial Reason propped half-open on the pillow beside me. Occasionally I lifted a finger to turn the page and allowed the heavy and confusing syntax to drift down through my eyes and into my brain like fluid. I'm bettering myself, I thought. I'm going to become so smart that no one will understand me. ~ Sally Rooney

Now she knows that in the intervening years Connell has been growing slowly more adjusted to the world, a process of adjustment that has been steady if sometimes painful, while she herself has been degenerating, moving further and further from wholesomeness, becoming something unrecognisably debased, and they have nothing left in common at all. ~ Sally Rooney

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

It was true, Peggy and Jamie were not very good people; bad people even, who took joy in putting others down. Marianne feels aggrieved that she fell for it, aggrieved that she thought she had anything in common with them, that she'd participated in the commodity market they passed off as friendship. In school she had believed herself to be above such frank exchanges of social capital, but her college life indicated that if anyone in school had actually been willing to speak to her, she would have behaved just as badly as anyone else. There is nothing superior about her at all. (194-195) ~ Sally Rooney

If anything, his personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced. Now he has a sense of invisibility, nothingness, with no reputation to recommend him to anyone. ~ Sally Rooney

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. ~ Sally Rooney

Anyway, she says. How are you?
He knows the question is meant honestly. He's not someone who feels comfortable confiding in others, or demanding things from them. He needs Marianne for this reason. This fact strikes him newly. Marianne is someone he can ask things of. Even though there are certain difficulties and resentments in their relationship, the relationship carries on. This seems remarkable now, and always moving.
Something kind of weird happened to me in the summer, he said. Can I tell you about it? ~ Sally Rooney

While they were driving through Longford they had the radio on, it was playing a White Lies song that had been popular when they were at school, and without touching the dial or raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the radio Connell said: You know I love you. ~ Sally Rooney

It was in my nature to absorb large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intellectual dominance. ~ Sally Rooney

Sometimes I feel embarrassed telling you stuff like that because it just seems stupid. To be honest, I still look up to you a lot,
I don't want you to think of me as, I don't know. Deluded. ~ Sally Rooney

I recognised that the only thing he had done to hurt me was to withdraw his affection, which he had every right to do. In every other way he had been courteous and thoughtful. At times I thought this was the worst misery I had experienced in my life, but it was also a very shallow misery, which at any time could have been relieved completely by a word from him and transformed into idiotic happiness. ~ Sally Rooney

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

Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it. ~ Sally Rooney

It was easy to write to Nick, but also competitive and thrilling, like a game of table tennis ~ Sally Rooney

At times he has the sensation that he and Marianne are like figure skaters, improvising their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronisation that it surprises them both. She tosses herself gracefully into the air, and each time, without knowing how he's going to do it, he catches her. ~ Sally Rooney

Connell was laughing at nothing, just because so much excitement demanded some kind of outward expression and he didn't want to cry. ~ Sally Rooney

Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance. It was permissible to touch each other and cry during football matches. ~ Sally Rooney

Marianne lived a drastically free life, he could see that. He was trapped by various considerations. He cared what people thought of him. ~ Sally Rooney

She experiences a depression so deep it is tranquilizing, she eats whatever he tells her to eat, she experiences no more ownership over her own body than if it were a piece of litter. ~ Sally Rooney

People in college are like this, unpleasantly smug one minute and then abasing themselves to show off their good manners the next. ~ Sally Rooney

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

People were always wanting me to show some weakness so they could reassure me. It made them feel worthy. ~ Sally Rooney

Curled up in bed with my arms folded I thought bitterly: he has all the power and I have none. This wasn't exactly true, but that night it was clear to me for the first time how badly I'd underestimated my vulnerability, ~ Sally Rooney

He senses a certain receptivity in her expression, like she's gathering information about his feelings, something they have learned to do to each other over a long time, like speaking a private language. ~ Sally Rooney

That was it, people moved away, he moved away. Their life in Carricklea, which they had imbued with such drama and significance, just ended like that with no conclusion, and it would never be picked back up again, never in the same way. ~ Sally Rooney

Knowing that they'll probably have sex again before they sleep probably makes the talking more pleasurable ~ Sally Rooney

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-coloured spine. Her long fingers turning the pages. She's not leading the same kind of life as other people. She acts so worldly at times, making him feel ignorant, but then she can be so naive. He wants to understand how her mind works... He writes these things down, long run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses, sometimes connected with breathless semicolons, as if he wants to recreate a precise copy of Marianne in print, as if he can preserve her completely for future review. ~ Sally Rooney

People look out for each other, and being Marianne's best friend and suspected sexual partner has elevated Connell to the status of rich-adjacent ~ Sally Rooney

Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one the unkind ones. ~ Sally Rooney

You think everyone you like is special, she said. I'm just a normal person. When you get to like someone, you make them feel like they're different from everyone else. You're doing it with Nick, you did it with me once. ~ Sally Rooney

Marianne opens the door when Connell rings his the bell ~ Sally Rooney

Lately he's consumed by a sense that he is in fact two separate people, and soon he will have to choose which person to be on a full-time basis, and leave the other person behind. He has a life in Carricklea, he has friends. If he went to college in Galway he could stay with the same social group, really, and live the life he has always planned on, getting a good degree, having a nice girlfriend. People would say he had done well for himself. On the other hand, he could go to Trinity like Marianne. Life would be different then. He would start going to dinner parties and having conversations about the Greek bailout. He could fuck some weird-looking girls who turn out to be bisexual. I've read The Golden Notebook, he could tell them. It's true, he has read it. After that he would never come back to Carricklea, he would go somewhere else, London, or Barcelona. People would not necessarily think he had done well; some people might think he had gone very bad, while others would forget about him entirely. What would Lorraine think? She would want him to be happy, and not care what others said. But the old Connell, the one all his friends know, that person would be dead in a way, or worse, buried alive, and screaming under the earth. (26-27) ~ Sally Rooney

He did gradually start to wonder why all their classroom discussions were so abstract and lacking in textual detail, and eventually he realised that most people were not actually doing the reading. They were coming into college every day to have heated debates about books they had not read. He understands now that his classmates are not like him. It's easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don't worry about appearing ignorant or conceited. ~ Sally Rooney

He tells her that she's beautiful. She has never heard that before, though she has sometimes privately suspected it of herself, but it feels different to hear it from another person. ~ Sally Rooney

That's money, the substance that makes the world real. There's something so corrupt and sexy about it ~ Sally Rooney

He tells her bad things about herself. It's hard to know whether Marianne likes to hear those things; shes desires to hear them, but she's conscious by now of being able to desire in some sense what she does not want. The quality of gratification is thin and hard, arriving too quickly and then leaving her sick and shivery. ~ Sally Rooney

Marianne wanted her life to mean something then, she wanted to stop all violence committed by the strong against the weak, and she remembered a time several years ago when she had 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, and she would live and die in a world of extreme violence against the innocent, and at most she could only help a few people. 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 ~ Sally Rooney

He presses his hands down slightly further into his pockets, as if trying to store his entire body in his pockets all at once. ~ Sally Rooney

They have sex again, not speaking very much. After that she feels peaceful and wants to sleep. He kisses her closed eyelids. It's not like this with other people, she says. Yeah, he says. I know. She senses there are things he isn't saying to her. She can't tell whether he's holding back a desire to pull away from her, or a desire to make himself more vulnerable somehow. He kisses her neck. Her eyes are getting heavy. I think we'll be fine, he says. She doesn't know or can't remember what he's talking about. She falls asleep. ~ Sally Rooney