419 Quotes by Sally Rooney

Well, but what does it mean for a relationship to 'work out'? He said. It was never going to be something conventional. If two people make each other happy then it's working.

Sometimes in the middle of the day she remembers something Jamie has said or done to her, and all the energy leaves her completely, so her body feels like a carcass, something immensely heavy and awful that she has to carry around.

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.

The inside of her body seems to be gravitating further and further downward, toward the floor, toward the center of the earth.

Shame surrounded her like a shroud. She could hardly see through it.

She's missing some primal instinct, self-defense or self-preservation, which makes other human being comprehensible.

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

Maybe I want to be treated badly, she says. I don't know. Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I'm a bad person.

Jamie is somehow both boring and hostile at the same time.