Home > Author > Sally Rooney
21 " At times a person will make eye contact with Marianne, a bus conductor or someone looking for change, and she’ll be shocked briefly into the realisation that this is in fact her life, that she is actually visible to other people. This feeling opens her to certain longings: hunger and thirst, a desire to speak Swedish, a physical desire to swim or dance. "
― Sally Rooney , Normal People
22 " She experiences a depression so deep it is tranquilizing, she eats whatever he tells her to eat, she experiences no more ownership over her own body than if it were a piece of litter. "
23 " The problem with museums [...] is that there's far too much art, so that no matter how well you plan your route or how noble your intentions, you will always find yourself walking irritably past priceless works of profound genius looking for the bathrooms. And you feel slightly cheapened afterwards, like you've let yourself down - at least I do. "
― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You
24 " Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one the unkind ones. "
― Sally Rooney , Conversations with Friends
25 " Things happened to him, like the crying fits, the panic attacks, but they seemed to descend on him from outside, rather than emanating from somewhere inside himself. Internally he felt nothing. 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. "
26 " A feeling of dissociation from his senses, an inability to think straight or interpret what he sees and hears. Things begin to look and sound different, slower, artificial, unreal. The first time it happened he thought he was losing his mind, that the whole cognitive framework by which he made sense of the world had disintegrated for good, and everything from then on would just be undifferentiated sound and colour. "
27 " He kissed me. I felt feverish and stupid, like a thirsty person with too much water suddenly pouring into their mouth. "
― Sally Rooney , Two Stories
28 " I need to be fun and likeable, I thought. A fun person would send a thank-you email. "
29 " Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance. It was permissible to touch each other and cry during football matches. "
30 " A school of taxis and cars swam past "
31 " He can't help Marianne, no matter what he does. There's something frightening about her, some huge emptiness in the pit of her being. "
32 " What kind of person would he be if it happened now? Someone very different? Or exactly the same person, himself, with no difference at all? "
33 " One does not think of you as a corporeal being really, but as a beam of pure intellect. And how I wish I had a little more of your radiance illuminating my life at the moment. "
34 " 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. "
35 " Jamie is somehow both boring and hostile at the same time. "
36 " 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. "
37 " He would walk down the hallway and people’s eyes would follow him, like he was a serial killer, or worse. "
38 " 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. "
39 " Yeah, I said. If there's one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets. "
40 " What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal [...] ? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same as always - just to live and be with other people? "