419 Quotes by Sally Rooney

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.

Life is exactly the same. Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.

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.

[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.

Miss Keaney was whistling and stamping her feet. On the pitch, Connell and Aidan embraced like reunited brothers. Connell was so beautiful. It occurred to Marianne how much she wanted to see him having sex with someone; it didn’t have to be her, it could be anybody. It would be beautiful just to watch him. She knew these were the kind of thoughts that made her different from other people in school, and weirder.

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.

I loved when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document which we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke which nobody else could understand. I liked to feel that he was my collaborator. I liked to think of him waking up at night and thinking of me.

Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through.

It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he used as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.