Some Quotes form 'Normal People' by Sally Rooney and a Video
Mohan Gulrajani
Normal People Quotes
“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
“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.”
― 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.”
― 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
“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
“Life offers up these moments of joy
despite everything,”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People
“I' m not a religious person but I do sometimes
think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People
“Life is the thing you bring with you inside
your own head.”
― 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
“Most people go through their whole lives, without ever really feeling
that close with anyone.”
― 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
“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
“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.”
― 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
“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
“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
“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
“People are a lot more knowledgeable than
they think they are.”
― 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
“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
“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
“He knows that a lot of the literary
people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured, 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. Even 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.”
― 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
“Suddenly he can spend an afternoon
in Vienna looking at Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, and it’s hot outside, and
if he wants he can buy himself a cheap cold glass of beer afterwards. It’s like
something he assumed was just a painted backdrop all his life has revealed
itself to be real: foreign cities are real, and famous artworks, and
underground railway systems, and remnants of the Berlin Wall. That’s money, the
substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy
about it.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People
“Marianne wanted her life to mean
something then, she wanted to stop all violence committed by the strong against
the weak, and she remembered a time several years ago when she had felt so
intelligent and young and powerful that she almost could have achieved such a
thing, and now she knew she wasn’t at all powerful, and she would live and die
in a world of extreme violence against the innocent, and at most she could only
help a few people. It was so much harder to reconcile herself to the idea of
helping a few, like she would rather help no one than do something so small and
feeble”
― 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
“Multiple times he has tried writing his
thoughts about Marianne down on paper in an effort to make sense of them. He's
moved by a desire to describe in words exactly how she looks and speaks. Her
hair and clothing. The copy of Swann's Way she reads at lunchtime in the school
cafeteria, with a dark French painting on the cover and a mint-coloured spine.
Her long fingers turning the pages. She's not leading the same kind of life as
other people. She acts so worldly at times, making him feel ignorant, but then
she can be so naive. He wants to understand how her mind works... He writes
these things down, long run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses,
sometimes connected with breathless semicolons, as if he wants to recreate a
precise copy of Marianne in print, as if he can preserve her completely for
future review.”
― 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
“Marianne, he said, I'm not a religious person
but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― 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
“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
“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
“Connell wished he knew how other
people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People
“the pleasure of being touched by
great art’.”
― 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
“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
“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
“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
“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 realisation 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“... the snow keeps falling, like a
ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake.”
― 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
“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
“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
“feeling a strange sense of nostalgia
for a moment that was already in the process of happening.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People
Goodreads has listed 509 quotes from this book. Complete list can be accessed by clicking at the following link.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/59141209-normal-people
Video link on the books mentioned in 'Normal People'
Dr. Mohan Gulrajani
Gurugram - Haryana - 122009
Ph. 9818253979, 0124-437676