419 Quotes by Sally Rooney

I’m just nervous, he says. I feel like it’s pretty obvious I don’t want you to leave. In a tiny voice she says: I don’t find it obvious what you want.

He finds himself crossing things out in his journal as if he imagines some future person poring over it in detail, as if he wants the future person to know which ideas he has thought better of.

If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.

He finds himself rushing to the end of the conversation so they can hang up, and then he can retrospectively savour how much he likes seeing her, without the moment-to-moment pressure of having to produce the right expressions and say the right things.

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.

Nothing had meant more to Rob than the approval of others; to be thought well of, to be a person of status. He would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance.

He was like a freezer item that had thawed too quickly on the outside and was melting everywhere, while the inside was still frozen solid. Somehow he was expressing more emotion than at any time in his life before, while simultaneously feeling less, feeling nothing.

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.

That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.