419 Quotes by Sally Rooney

He was the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music.

They look at one another. She’s a little flushed, and her lipstick is smudged just slightly on her lower lip. Her gaze unsettles him like it used to, like looking into a mirror, seeing something that has no secrets from you.

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.

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.

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.

Is it possible we could develop an alternative model of loving each other?

Not that God existed in any material way but as a shared cultural practice so widespread that it came to seem materially real, like language or gender.

I think we’re at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.

At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape.