The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“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.” (Conversations with Friends Quotes)
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“According to you the only way to love someone is to let them treat you like shit”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“Afterward I lay on my side with A Critique of Postcolonial Reason propped half-open on the pillow beside me. Occasionally I lifted a finger to turn the page and allowed the heavy and confusing syntax to drift down through my eyes and into my brain like fluid. I’m bettering myself, I thought. I’m going to become so smart that no one will understand me.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“At a certain level of abstraction, anyone could have written the poem, but that didn’t feel true either. It seemed as though what he was really saying was: there’s something beautiful about the way you think and feel, or the way you experience the world is beautiful in some way.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“At times I thought this was the worst misery I had experienced in my life, but it was also a very shallow misery, which at any time could have been relieved completely by a word from him and transformed into idiotic happiness.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“But the acclaim also felt like part of the performance itself, the best part, and the most pure expression of what I was trying to do, which was to make myself into this kind of person: someone worthy of praise, worthy of love.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“Even if I had any faith, it wasn’t going to make me whole. There was no use thinking about it.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen. I applied for jobs and turned up for seminars. Things went on.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“He was the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I concluded that some kinds of reality have an unrealistic effect, which made me think of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, though I had never read his books and these were probably not the issues his writing addressed.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I isolated myself from criticism so I could behave badly without losing my sense of righteousness.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I laughed to myself although there was no one there to see me. I loved when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke that nobody else could understand. I liked to feel that he was my collaborator. I liked to think of him waking up at night and thinking of me.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I like getting compliments where I don’t have to make eye contact with the person”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I liked the other girls, I let them copy my homework, but I was lonely and felt unworthy of real friendship. I made lists of the things I had to improve about myself.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I liked to sit in the library to write essays, allowing my sense of time and personal identity to dissolve as the light dimmed outside the windows.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I loved when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke that nobody else could understand.” (Conversations with Friends Quotes)
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I ran my finger along his collarbone and said: I can’t remember if I thought about this at the beginning. How it was doomed to end unhappily. He nodded, looking at me. I did, he said. I just thought it would be worth it.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn’t make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn’t make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I seemed to have no power over what was happening, or what was going to happen. It felt as if a long fever had broken and I simply had to lie there and wait for the illness to pass.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body. I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I tried to make myself think about things logically. Anxiety was just a chemical phenomenon producing bad feelings. Feelings were just feelings, they had no material reality.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I was going through a second upbringing: learning a new set of assumptions, and feigning a greater level of understanding than I really possessed.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I was happy he said that, because it was what I wanted him to think, and because I thought he really knew that and was just kidding around.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I was lonely and felt unworthy of real friendship. I made lists of the things I had to improve about myself.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“I’m going to become so smart that no one will understand me.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“If two people make each other happy then it’s working.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“In bed we talked for hours, conversations that spiralled out from observations into grand, abstract theories and back again. I didn’t feel with her, like I did with many other people, that while I was talking she was just preparing the next thing she wanted to say.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“Is it possible we could develop an alternative model of loving each other?”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“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
“My body felt completely disposable, like a placeholder for something more valuable. I fantasized about taking it apart and lining my limbs up side by side to compare them.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“My ego had always been an issue. I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“My favourite part of the gospels was in Matthew, when Jesus said: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you. I shared in this desire for moral superiority over my enemies. Jesus always wanted to be the better person, and so did I. I underlined this passage in red pencil several times, to illustrate that I understood the Christian way of life.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“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.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“People were always wanting me to show some weakness so they could reassure me. It made them feel worthy, I knew all about that.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“She hung up on me. Afterwards I lay on my bed feeling like a light had been switched off.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“Since when have you loved me? I said. Since I met you, I would think. If I wanted to be very philosophical about it, I’d say I loved you before then.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“Something being over is not the same as something never having happened.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“Sometimes this felt like a failure to take an interest in my own life, which depressed me. On the other hand, I felt that my disinterest in wealth was ideologically healthy.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“The idea of making images of a uterus that had nothing in it struck me as sad, like photographing an abandoned house.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right to not love anyone.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“They took her radical politics as a kind of bourgeois self-deprecation, nothing very serious, and talked to her about restaurants or where to stay in Rome.” (Conversations with Friends Quotes)
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn’t know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought. I need to relax and let things go. I should experiment with drugs.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought. I need to relax and let things go. I should experiment with drugs. These thoughts were not unusual for me.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“Things that are over aren’t the same as things that never happened.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“This could only interfere with my other ambitions, such as achieving enlightenment and being a fun girl.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“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 of the unkind ones.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“We can sleep together if you want, but you should know I’m only doing it ironically.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“When I read the Bible I picture you as Jesus, so maybe fainting in a church was a metaphor after all.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“When we came out of the theater it was raining again. I felt pure and tiny like a newborn baby. Philip put up his umbrella and we walked toward his bus stop while I sort of grinned manically at nothing and touched my own hair a lot.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“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
“You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“You think everyone you like is special, she said. I’m just a normal person. When you get to like someone, you make them feel like they’re different from everyone else. You’re doing it with Nick, you did it with me once.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“You think you’re the kind of person who can deal with something and then it happens and you realize you can’t.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
“You underestimate your own power so you don’t have to blame yourself for treating other people badly.”
Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends
