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Sally Rooney QUOTES

Sally Rooney QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Sally Rooney , Conversations with Friends

2 " I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible. "

― Sally Rooney , Conversations with Friends

3 " Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said. Of course it's really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it's harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on 'niceness' as a kind of stand-in. I mean this is an issue in public discourse. We end up asking like, is Israel 'nicer' than Palestine. "

― Sally Rooney , Conversations with Friends

4 " 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. "

― Sally Rooney , Normal People

5 " It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. "

― Sally Rooney , Normal People

6 " Connell thinks the aspects of himself that are most compatible with Helen are his best aspects: his loyalty, his basically practical outlook, his desire to be thought of as a good guy. - he doesn't have that persistent sensation that he belongs nowhere, that he never will belong anywhere. 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. "

― Sally Rooney , Normal People

7 " It would be a sort of sick, insane thing to do, a way of mutilating my real life as a gesture of submission to an imagined future. "

― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You

8 " We used to watch films together like that. And he would touch my hair in that exact way, distractedly. I found his distraction comforting. In a way i wanted to live inside it, as if it was a place of it's own, where he had never noticed I had entered. "

― Sally Rooney , Two Stories

9 " Anyways I suggested it to him, that I could try being more submissive. And it turns out he likes to beat me up. "

― Sally Rooney , Normal People

10 " I love you. I am not just saying that, I really do. Her eyes fill up with tears again and she closes them. Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she's aware of this now, while it's happening. She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life. "

― Sally Rooney , Normal People

11 " I wasn’t used to being attacked like this and it was frightening. I thought of myself as an independent person, so independent that the opinions of others were irrelevant to me. Now I was afraid that Nick was right. I isolated myself from criticism so I could behave badly without losing my sense of righteousness. "

― Sally Rooney , Conversations with Friends

12 " Were they aware, in the intensity of their embrace, of something slightly ridiculous about this tableau, something almost comical, as someone nearby sneezed violently into a crumpled tissue; as a dirty discarded plastic bottle scuttled along the platform under a breath of wind; as a mechanised billboard on the station wall rotated from an advertisement for hair products to an advertisement for car insurance; as life in its ordinariness and even ugly vulgarity imposed itself everywhere all around them? Or were they in this moment unaware, or something more than unaware—were they somehow invulnerable to, untouched by, vulgarity and ugliness, glancing for a moment into something deeper, something concealed beneath the surface of life, not unreality but a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world? "

― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You

13 " Most people go through their whole lives, without ever really feeling that close with anyone. "

― Sally Rooney , Normal People

14 " It's not that I get off on being degraded as such, she says. I just like to know that I would degrade myself for someone if they wanted me too. Does that make sense? I don't know if it does, I've been thinking about it. It's about dynamic, more than what actually happens. "

― Sally Rooney , Normal People

15 " He feels ambivalent about this, as if it’s disloyal of him, because maybe he’s enjoying how she looks or some physical aspect of her closeness. He’s not sure what friends are allowed to enjoy about each other. "

― Sally Rooney , Normal People

16 " This idea is so basic that when I first thought of it, I felt very brilliant, and then I wondered if I was an idiot. "

― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You

17 " I lay there in the bath not thinking, not doing anything. After a few seconds, I heard her open the front door, and then her voice saying: she's had a really rough day, so just be nice to her. And Nick said: I know, I will. I loved them both so much in this moment that I wanted to appear in front of them like a benevolent ghost and sprinkle blessings into their lives. Thank you, I wanted to say. Thank you both. You are my family now. "

― Sally Rooney , Conversations with Friends

18 " Her gaze unsettles him like it used to, like looking into a mirror, seeing something that has no secrets from you. "

― Sally Rooney , Normal People

19 " For a moment it seems possible to keep both worlds, both versions of his life, and to move inbetween them just like through a door. "

― Sally Rooney , Normal People

20 " Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves. "

― Sally Rooney , Normal People