Conversations With Friends Sally Rooney Quotes

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 think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.

You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly.

Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through.

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.

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.

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.

You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.

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.

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.

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.

I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived.

This could only interfere with my other ambitions, such as achieving enlightenment and being a fun girl.

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.

People were always wanting me to show some weakness so they could reassure me. It made them feel worthy.

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.

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. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was “kindness” just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.

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.

Is it possible we could develop an alternative model of loving each other?

She slipped out of my grasp like a thought.

We can sleep together if you want, but you should know I’m only doing it ironically. ​

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.

I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better.

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.

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.

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.

Curled up in bed with my arms folded I thought bitterly: he has all the power and I have none. This wasn't exactly true, but that night it was clear to me for the first time how badly I'd underestimated my vulnerability,

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.

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.

I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things. Bobbi told me she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality’, but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterwards think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am.

Though I knew that I would eventually have to enter full-time employment, I certainly never fantasized about a radiant future where I was paid to perform an economic role. Sometimes this felt like a failure to take an interest in my own life, which depressed me.

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 the unkind ones.

I was going through a second upbringing: learning a new set of assumptions, and feigning a greater level of understanding than I really possessed.

You think you’re the kind of person who can deal with something and then it happens and you realize you can’t.

...our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke which nobody else could understand.

I had no achievements or possessions that proved I was a serious person.

It was a relationship, and also not a relationship. Each of our gestures felt spontaneous, and if from the outside we resembled a couple, that was an interesting coincidence for us. We developed a joke about it, which was meaningless to everyone including ourselves: what is a friend? we would say humorously. What is a conversation?

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.

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.

When I read the Bible I picture you as Jesus, so maybe fainting in a church was a metaphor after all.

Something being over is not the same as something never having happened.

I wasn’t used to being attacked like this and it was frightening. I thought of myself as an independent person, so independent that the opinions of others were irrelevant to me. Now I was afraid that Nick was right. I isolated myself from criticism so I could behave badly without losing my sense of righteousness.

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.

She hung up on me. Afterwards I lay on my bed feeling like a light had been switched off.

Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought. I need to relax and let things go.

You could die, I thought, and it was a nice relaxing thought at the time. I imagined death like a switch, switching off all the pain and noise, cancelling everything.

I’m bettering myself, I thought. I’m going to become so smart that no one will understand me.

You’re twenty-one, said Melissa. You should be disastrously unhappy.

I lay there in the bath not thinking, not doing anything. After a few seconds, I heard her open the front door, and then her voice saying: she's had a really rough day, so just be nice to her. And Nick said: I know, I will. I loved them both so much in this moment that I wanted to appear in front of them like a benevolent ghost and sprinkle blessings into their lives. Thank you, I wanted to say. Thank you both. You are my family now.

I like getting compliments where I don't have to make eye contact with the person

Bobbi thinks depression is a humane response to the conditions of late capitalism.

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.

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.

didn’t know how to join in their new friendship without debasing myself for their attention.

No one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy.

I had the sense that something in my life had ended, my image of myself as a whole or normal person maybe. 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. Nothing would. I thanked my mother for the lift to the station and got out of the car.

Do you ever feel like you don’t know what you’re doing with your life?

I was appropriating my fear of total disappearance as a spiritual practice. I was inhabiting disappearance as something that could reveal and inform, rather than totalise and annihilate.

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.

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.

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.

I know you don’t like to see upset by things. But it’s not a sign of weakness to have feelings.

She said she found religious occasions, like funerals or weddings, ‘comforting in a kind of sedative way’. They’re communal, she said. There’s something nice about that for the neurotic individualist.

That sounds like a recipe for disastrous unhappiness, I said. You’re twenty-one, said Melissa. You should be disastrously unhappy.

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.

Real writers, and also painters, had to keep on looking at the ugly things they had done for good. I hated that everything I did was so ugly, but also that I lacked the courage to confront how ugly it was.

A searing anxiety developed inside me at this thought, in the same form it always took no matter what external stimulus triggered it: first the realization that I would die, then that everyone else would die, and then that the universe itself would eventually experience heat death, a kind of thought sequence that expanded outward endlessly in forms too huge to be contained inside my body.

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.

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.

I’m sorry, he said. I’m just finding you kind of hostile. You’re interpreting your failure to hurt me as hostility on my part, I said. That’s interesting.

Yeah, I said. If there's one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets.

I hated them both, with the intensity of passionate love.

At this point I felt a weird lack of self-recognition, and I realised that I couldn't visualise my own face and body at all. It was like someone had lifted the end of an invisible pencil and just gently erased my entire appearance

I was like an empty cup, which Nick had emptied out, and now I had to look at what had spilled out of me: all my delusional beliefs about my own value and my pretensions to being a kind of person I wasn’t. While I was full of these things I couldn’t see them. Now that I was nothing, only an empty glass, I could see everything about myself.

People were always wanting me to show some weakness so they could reassure me. It made them feel worthy, I knew all about that.

According to you the only way to love someone is to let them treat you like shit

it seemed clear that no matter how unsubtly I fished for his reassurance he wasn’t going to provide it.

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.

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.

If two people make each other happy then it's working.

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.

Bobbi could be abrasive and unrestrained in a way that made people uncomfortable,

It was easy to write to Nick, but also competitive and thrilling, like a game of table tennis

Who even gets married? said Bobbi. It’s sinister. Who wants state apparatuses sustaining their relationship?

It's weird knowing someone just casually, he said, and then later finding out they're observing things all the time. Its like, God, what has this person noticed about me?

I need to be fun and likeable, I thought. A fun person would send a thank-you email.

Remember the first time we kissed? he said. At the party. And I said I didn’t think the utility room was a good place to be kissing and we left. You know I went up to my room and waited for you, right? I mean for hours. And at first I really thought you would come. It was probably the most wretched I ever felt in my life, this kind of ecstatic wretchedness that in a way I was practically enjoying. Because even if you did come upstairs, what then? The house was full of people, it’s not like anything was going to happen. But every time I thought of going back down again I would imagine hearing you on the stairs, and I couldn’t leave, I mean I physically couldn’t. Anyway, how I felt then, knowing that you were close by and feeling completely paralyzed by it, this phone call was similar. If I told you where my car was right now, I don’t think I’d be able to leave, I think I would have to stay here just in case you changed your mind about everything. You know, I still have that impulse to be available to you. You'll notice I didn't buy anything in the supermarket.

I told him I thought he was such an appealing love object partly because he was so curiously passive. I knew I would have to be the one to kiss you, I said. And that you would never kiss me, which made me feel vulnerable. But I also felt this terrible power, like, you’re going to let me kiss you, what else will you let me do? It was sort of intoxicating. I couldn’t decide if I had complete control over you or no control at all.

Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought.

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.

You underestimate your own power so you don’t have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. You tell yourself stories about it. Oh well, Bobbi’s rich, Nick’s a man, I can’t hurt these people. If anything they’re out to hurt me and I’m defending myself.

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

Instead of thinking gigantic thoughts, I tried to focus on something small, the smallest thing I could think of. Someone once made this pew I’m sitting on, I thought. Someone sanded the wood and varnished it. Someone carried it into the church. Someone laid the tiles on the floor, someone fitted the windows. Each brick was placed by human hands, each hinge fitted on each door, every road surface outside, every bulb in every streetlight. And even things built by machines were really built by human beings, who built the machines initially. And human beings themselves, made by other humans, struggling to create happy children and families. Me, all the clothing I wear, all the language I know. Who put me here in this church, thinking these thoughts? Other people, some I know very well and others I have never met. Am I myself, or am I them? Is this me, Frances? No, it is not me. It is the others. Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labor of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.

She pronounced Liese's name without any particular love or hatred, just a girl she had known, and for months afterwards, maybe forever afterwards, I was afraid that someday she would say my name that way too.

Over the summer I missed the periods of intense academic concentration that helped to relax me during term time. 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.

Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labor of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.

I had wanted Melissa to take an interest in me and I was't even sure I liked her. I didn't have the option not to take her seriously, because she had published a book, which proved that lots of other people took her seriously even if I didn't. At twenty-one, I had no achievements or possessions that proved I was a serious person.

I had left myself no one to confine in, no one who would feel any sympathy for what I'd done. And after all that, he was in love with someone else. I screwed my eyes shut and presses my head down hard into the pillow. I thought of the night before, when he told me that he wanted me, how it felt then. Just admit it, I thought. He doesn't love you. That's what hurts.

For a time they sat there on the stairs, not speaking, or speaking absently about things that had happened a long time ago, silly arguments they’d had, people they used to know, things they had laughed about together. Old conversations, repeated many times before. Then quiet again for a little while. I just want everything to be like it was, Eileen said. And for us to be young again and live near each other, and nothing to be different. Alice was smiling sadly. But if things are different, can we still be friends? she asked. Eileen put her arm around Alice’s shoulders. If you weren’t my friend I wouldn’t know who I was, she said. Alice rested her face in Eileen’s arm, closing her eyes. No, she agreed. I wouldn’t know who I was either. And actually for a while I didn’t. Eileen looked down at Alice’s small blonde head, nestled on the sleeve of her dressing gown. Neither did I, she said. Half past two in the morning. Outside, astronomical twilight. Crescent moon hanging low over the dark water. Tide returning now with a faint repeating rush over the sand. Another place, another time.

While I let myself into the apartment I thought about Nick entering the room while everybody applauded. This now felt perfect to me, so perfect that I was glad he had missed the performance. Maybe having him witness how much others approved of me, without taking any of the risks necessary to earn Nick’s personal approval, made me feel capable of speaking to him again, as if I also was an important person with lots of admirers like he was, as if there was nothing inferior about me. 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.