The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“And hopefully I have changed, you know, as a person. But honestly, if I have, it’s because of you.” (Normal People Quotes)
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“All these years, they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“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 realization 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
“At times he has the sensation that he and Marianne are like figure skaters, improvising their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronisation that it surprises them both. She tosses herself gracefully into the air, and each time, without knowing how he’s going to do it, he catches her.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind him.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Connell is silent again. He leans down and kisses her on the forehead. I would never hurt you, okay? he says. Never. She nods and says nothing. You make me really happy, he says. His hand moves over her hair and he adds: I love you. I’m 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
“Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Could he really do the gruesome things he does to her and believe at the same time that he’s acting out of love? Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence?”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Dublin is extraordinarily beautiful to her in wet weather, the way gray stone darkens to black, and rain moves over the grass and whispers on slick roof tiles. Raincoats glistening in the undersea color of street lamps. Rain silver as loose change in the glare of traffic.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Feeling a strange sense of nostalgia for a moment that was already in the process of happening.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“For a moment it seems possible to keep both worlds, both versions of his life, and to move in between them just like moving through a door. He can have the respect of someone like Marianne and also be well liked in school, he can form secret opinions and preferences, no conflict has to arise, he never has to choose one thing over another. With only a little subterfuge he can live two entirely separate existences, never confronting the ultimate question of what to do with himself or what kind of person he is. This thought is so consoling that for a few seconds he avoids meeting Marianne’s eye, wanting to sustain the belief for just a little longer. He knows that when he looks at her, he won’t be able to believe it anymore.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“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
“He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“He did gradually start to wonder why all their classroom discussions were so abstract and lacking in textual detail, and eventually he realised that most people were not actually doing the reading. They were coming into college every day to have heated debates about books they had not read. He understands now that his classmates are not like him. It’s easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don’t worry about appearing ignorant or conceited.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“He does have immaculate taste. He’s sensitive to the most minuscule of aesthetic failures, in painting, in cinema, even in novels or television shows. Sometimes when Marianne mentions a film she has recently watched, he waves his hand and says: It fails for me. This quality of discernment, she has realised, does not make Lukas a good person. He has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong. The fact that this is even possible unsettles Marianne, and makes art seem pointless suddenly.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“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.” (Normal People Quotes)
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“He has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong. The fact that this is even possible unsettles Marianne, and makes art seem pointless suddenly.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“He has sincerely wanted to die, but he has never sincerely wanted Marianne to forget about him. That’s the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her. ”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“He often makes blithe remarks about things he ‘wishes’. I wish you didn’t have to go, he says when she’s leaving, or: I wish you could stay the night. If he really wished any of those things, Marianne knows, then they would happen. Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn’t make him happy.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“He presses his hands down slightly further into his pockets, as if trying to store his entire body in his pockets all at once.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“He said he wished he could show her but there were always people around. He often makes blithe remarks about things he ‘wishes’. I wish you didn’t have to go, he says when she’s leaving, or: I wish you “could stay the night. If he really wished for any of those things, Marianne knows, then they would happen. Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn’t make him happy.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“He tells her that she’s beautiful. She has never heard that before, though she has sometimes privately suspected it of herself, but it feels different to hear it from another person.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“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. Somehow he was expressing more emotion than at any time in his life before, while simultaneously feeling less, feeling nothing.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Her body is just an item of property, and though it has been handed around and misused in various ways, it has somehow always belonged to him, and she feels like returning it to him now.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“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
“How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, says Marianne. I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“I guess everyone is a mystery in a way, she says. I mean, you can never really know another person, and so on.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“I hope we can always take each other’s sides, she says. It’s very comforting for me.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“I like you so much, Marianne said. Connell felt a pleasurable sorrow come over him, which brought him close to tears. Moments of emotional pain arrived like this, meaningless or at least indecipherable. Marianne lived a drastically free life, he could see that. He was trapped by various considerations. He cared what people thought of him. He even cared what Marianne thought, that was obvious now.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“I’ m not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“I think we’re at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“I Wasn’t Aware That My Eye Line Fell Under The Jurisdiction Of School Rules.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“I Would Lie Down Here, And You Could Do Anything You Wanted To Me.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“I Would Never Pretend To Not Know You, Connell.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“If anything, his personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced. Now he has a sense of invisibility, nothingness, with no reputation to recommend him to anyone.” (Normal People Quotes)
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“If he silently decides not to say something when they’re talking, Marianne will ask ‘what?’ within one or two seconds. This ‘what?’ question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“If she was different with Connell, the difference was not happening inside herself, in her personhood, but in between them, in the dynamic.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence?”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it “the pleasure of being touched by great art.” In those words it almost sounds sexual.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he’s trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he used as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“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
“It’s always easy to think of reasons not to do something.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“It’s funny the decisions you make because you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different. I think we’re at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“It’s time you’ll never get back, Marianne adds. I mean, the time is real. The money is also real. Well, but the time is more real. Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Lately he’s consumed by a sense that he is in fact two separate people, and soon he will have to choose which person to be on a full-time basis, and leave the other person behind.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything,”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Marianne expressed her feelings about Connell mainly in terms of her sustained interest in his opinions and beliefs, the curiosity she feels about his life, and her instinct to survey his thoughts whenever she feels conflicted about anything.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“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
“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it. She had that feeling in school often, but it wasn’t accompanied by any specific images of what the real life might look or feel like. All she knew was that when it started, she wouldn’t need to imagine it anymore.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Marianne lived a drastically free life, he could see that. He was trapped by various considerations. He cared what people thought of him.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“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
“Marianne, he said, I’m not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Most people go through their whole lives, without ever really feeling that close with anyone.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.” (Normal People Quotes)
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Not having friends to eat with, he reads over lunch. At the weekends when there’s football on, he checks the team news and then goes back to reading instead of watching the build-up. One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma where it seems like Mr Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation. He’s amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectual unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it ‘the pleasure of being touched by great art’.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Outside her breath rises in a fine mist and the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“People are a lot more knowable than they think they are.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“She believes Marianne lacks ‘warmth’, by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another. You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“She felt happy to be surrounded by people she liked, who liked her. She knew that if she wanted to speak, people would probably turn around and listen out of sincere interest, and that made her happy too, although she had nothing at all to say.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“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
“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.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“So many things pass secretly between people anyway. 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.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Sometimes she made him laugh, but other days he was taciturn, inscrutable, and after he left she would feel high, nervous, at once energetic and terribly drained.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure in his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“The conversations that follow are gratifying for Connell, often taking unexpected turns and prompting him to express ideas he had never consciously formulated before. They talk about the novels he’s reading, the research she studies, the precise historical moment that they are currently living in, the difficulty of observing such a moment in process. At times he has the sensation that he and Marianne are like figure-skaters, improvising their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronisation that it suprises them both. She tosses herself gracefully into the air, and each time, without knowing how he’s going to do it, he catches her.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“The experience of writing them feels like an expression of a broader and more fundamental principle, something in his identity, or something even more abstract, to do with life itself.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“The outside world touches against her outside skin, but not the other part of herself, inside.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“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.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“There’s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“They Literally Show Up To Discuss A Book They Haven’t Even Read And Then They Just Bang On About It With Complete Confidence.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“They look at one another. She’s a little flushed, and her lipstick is smudged just slightly on her lower lip. Her gaze unsettles him like it used to, like looking into a mirror, seeing something that has no secrets from you.” (Normal People Quotes)
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“They were standing very close. She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted, he knew that.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“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.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“This was probably the most horrifying thing Eric could have said to him, not because it ended his life, but because it didn’t. He knew then that the secret for which he had sacrificed his own happiness and the happiness of another person had been trivial all along, and worthless.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“To me it’s weird when animals pause because they seem so intelligent, but maybe that’s because I associate pausing with thought.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“While they were driving through Longford they had the radio on, it was playing a White Lies song that had been popular when they were at school, and without touching the dial or raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the radio Connell said: You know I love you.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“You Just Always Know What You Think. I’m Not Like That.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“You need to get straight in your mind what you think a good society would look like, said Marianne. And if you think people should be able to go to college and get English degrees, you shouldn’t feel guilty for doing that yourself, because you have every right to.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
“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.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”
Sally Rooney
Normal People
