419 Quotes by Sally Rooney

Marianne replaces the yogurt pot in the freezer now and asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work – to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money. 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.

Marianne’s classmates all seem to like school so much and find it normal. To dress in the same uniform every day, to comply at all times with arbitrary rules, to be scrutinised and monitored for misbehavior, this is normal to them. They have no sense of the school as an oppressive environment.

I have to laugh now or I’m going to start crying.

I feel very embarrassed by all that now, but I was lonely and unhappy, and I didn’t understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness.

Marianne drags a chair back from the table and sits down. Men can be possessive, she says. I know! says Peggy. It’s crazy. You’d think they would jump at the idea of multiple partners. Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves, says Marianne.

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. He didn’t say anything else. She said she loved him too and he nodded and continued driving as if nothing at all had happened, which in a way it hadn’t.

But then, you’re not really submitting to someone if you only submit to things you enjoy.

She’s already applied for History and Politics in Trinity. He’s put down Law in Galway, but now he thinks that he might change it, because, as Marianne has pointed out, he has no interest in Law. He can’t even visually imagine himself as a lawyer, wearing a tie and so on, possibly helping to convict people of crimes. He just put it down because he couldn’t think of anything else.

Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought.