419 Quotes by Sally Rooney

She’s missing some primal instinct, self-defense or self-preservation, which makes other human beings comprehensible. You lean in expecting resistance, and everything just falls away in front of you.

The medication is doing its chemical work inside his brain now anyway, no matter what he does or says. He gets up and showers every morning, he turns up for work in the library, he doesn’t really fantasize about jumping off a bridge. He takes the medication, life goes on.

Soon she will be packing things into suitcases: woolen jumpers, skirts, her two silk dresses. A set of teacups and saucers patterned with flowers. A hairdryer, a frying pan, four white cotton towels. A coffeepot. The objects of a new existence.

I feel like the NSA agent reading these emails has the wrong impression of us, Marianne wrote once. They probably don’t know about the time you didn’t invite me to the Debs.

No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.

She believes Marianne lacks ‘warmth’, by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.

To feel that literature has any politically redemptive power at all just seems increasingly naive.

You can spend hours editing an email but send it as if you wrote it in a minute.

I feel like I could devote myself to far more important things than writing novels.