101
" Of course I can't complain, because everyone is always telling me to 'enjoy it'. What would they know? They haven't been here, I've done it all alone. Okay, it's been a small experience in its own way, and it will all blow over in a few months or years and no one will even remember me, thank God. But still I've had to do it, I've had to get through it on my own with no one to teach me how, and it has made me loathe myself to an almost unendurable degree. Whatever I can do, whatever insignificant talent I might have, people just expect me to sell it-I mean literallly, sell it for money, until I have a lot of money and no talent left. And then that's it, I'm finished, and the next flashy twenty-five-year-old with an impending psychological collapse comes along. "
― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You
109
" All my feelings and experiences were in one sense extremely
intense, and in another sense completely trivial, because none
of my decisions seemed to have any consequences, and noth-
ing about my life - the job, the apartment, the desires, the love
affairs - struck me as permanent. I felt anything was possible,
that there were no doors shut behind me, and that out there
somewhere, as yet unknown, there were people who would
love and admire me and want to make me happy. "
― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You
117
" People who intentionally become famous—I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it—are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill. The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture, as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable, indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease. There is something wrong with them, and when we look at them and learn from them, something goes wrong with us. "
― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You