Beautiful World, Where Are You QUOTES

2 " 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

4 " 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

6 " 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? "

― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You

8 " If novelists wrote honestly about their own lives, no one would read novels— and quite rightly! "

― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You

10 " Dry upturned sycamore leaves scuttling like claws along the South Circular Road. The artificial buttered taste of popcorn in the cinema. Pale-yellow sky in the evening, Thomas Street draped in mist. "

― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You

12 " Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other. "

― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You

14 " And we hate people for
making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the
easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one. "

― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You

16 " What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people? "

― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You

18 " If God wanted me to give you up, he wouldn't have made me who I am. "

― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You

20 " Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse - we can't remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing. "

― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You