Sally Rooney

Marianne cooks dinner, spaghetti or risotto, and then he washes up and tidies the kitchen. He wipes crumbs out from under the toaster and she reads him jokes from Twitter

With other people she seemed so independent and remote, but with Connell she was different, a different person. He was the only one who knew her like that.

Marianne, he said, I’m not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.

My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.

I mean literally, 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.

The affair might be over, I thought, but something being over is not the same as something never having happened.

In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.
FRANK O’HARA

I wondered if people just got used to being so good-looking and eventually found it boring, but it was hard to imagine.

I told him I was easily seduced by people who laughed at my jokes and he said he was easily seduced by people who were smarter than he was.

I knew that Nick was suffering no similar after-effects. There was nothing equivalent about us. He had screwed me up in his hand like paper and tossed me away.