sally rooney bot

Last Friday, he told her he always found it pretty intense. But I mean practically romantic, said Marianne. I think I was starting to have feelings for you there at one point. He smiled at the ceiling. You just have to repress all that stuff, Marianne, he said. That’s what I do.

In school on Monday he had to avoid looking at Marianne or interacting with her in any way. He carried the secret around like something large and hot, like an overfull tray of hot drinks that he had to carry everywhere and never spill.

I feel very embarrassed by all that now, but I was lonely and unhappy, and I didn’t understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness.

Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine?

It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence. [...] without other people, there would be no life at all. Judgement, reproval, disappointment, conflict: these are the means by which people remain connected to one another.

He doesn't love you. That's what it hurts.

Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent.

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.

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.

Marianne looked on, slightly drunk, admiring the way Sophie and Connell looked together, his hands on her smooth brown shins, and feeling a strange sense of nostalgia for a moment that was already in the process of happening.

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

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

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

If God wanted me to give you up, he wouldn't have made me who I am

Nothing inside my body was trying to kill me. Death was, of course, the most ordinary thing that could happen, at some level I knew that. Still, I had stood there waiting to see the body in the river, ignoring the real living bodies all around me, as if death was more of a miracle than life was.

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.

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 or become part of it.

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.

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