419 Quotes by Sally Rooney

She tries to be a good person. But deep down she knows she is a bad person, corrupted, wrong, and all her efforts to be right, to have the right opinions, to say the right things, these efforts only disguise what is buried inside her, the evil part of herself.

When he talks to Marianne he has a sense of total privacy between them. He could tell her anything about himself, even weird things, and she would never repeat them, he knows that. Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life then closing it behind him. He’s not frightened of her, she’s pretty relaxed person, but he fears being around her, because of the confusing way he finds himself behaving, the things he says that would never ordinarily say.

It's funny the decision you make because you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different. I think we're at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.

Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn't make him happy.

His friends seem so obsessed with their fathers, obsessed with emulating them or being different from them in specific ways. When they fight with their fathers, the fights always seem to mean one thing on the surface but conceal another secret meaning beneath.

Now she knows that in the intervening years Connell has been growing slowly more adjusted to the world, a process of adjustment that has been steady if sometimes painful, while she herself has been degenerating, moving further and further from wholesomeness, becoming something unrecognisably debased, and they have nothing left in common at all.

Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.

It’s interesting to watch an event being recycled as culture in real time, she says. You know, you’re watching the process of cultural production while it takes place, rather than in retrospect. I don’t know if that’s unique.

A certain peace had come to me and I wondered if it was God’s doing after all. 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.