Tag: sally rooney

You believe there is something?

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You believe there is something? she asks. I try to, yeah, Ivan answers. Some kind of order in the universe, at least. I do feel that sometimes. Listening to certain music, or looking at art. Even playing chess, although that might sound weird. It’s like the order is so deep, and it’s so beautiful, I feel there must be something underneath it all. And at other times, I think it’s just chaos, and there’s nothing. Maybe the whole idea of order just comes from some evolutionary advantage, whatever it is. We recognise patterns when there are no patterns. I don’t know. I’m not explaining myself very well. But when I experience that sense of beauty, it does make me believe in God. Like there’s a meaning behind everything.

— Sally Rooney, Intermezzo: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 24, 2024)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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One of the things that I find haunting or difficult to accept is that I only get one life. I’m condemned to being myself, and I have to be me until the end. In a way, being a novelist allows me to get around that problem…

But what you’re talking about and what I’m talking about might be closer than you think. Because what you’re describing I also feel. Especially when I’m in the middle of a project and I close my laptop and return to my own life, I feel that sense of indescribable gratitude that I am alive on this earth, that my loved ones are a part my life and that I can experience the sensory reality of the earth that we share.⁠⁠

— Sally Rooney, in “Sally Rooney Thinks Growth is Overrated” (NY Times Interview by David Marchese, September, 21, 2024)

Sally Rooney’s new book Intermezzo is released tomorrow. Here’s the Irish Times book review. She is the best selling author of Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018), and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021).

Crescent Moon 2

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And out the windows the sky was still dimming, darkening, the vast earth turning slowly on its axis… 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.

— Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 7, 2021)

Notes:

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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And maybe that’s better. It makes me feel that rather than worrying and theorising about the state of the world, which helps no one, I should put my energy into living and being happy. When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child—a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there… Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth. What else is life for?

— Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 7, 2021)

Notes:

Walking Cross Town. With Ooga-Chaka Ooga-Ooga.

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She asks: Why do you post what you post on your blog? I had to stop, and pause for a moment.

Well, it’s Morris Berman’s “tipoff…whenever a project comes to me, one that is right, that is genuine, I feel a kind of ‘shiver’ in my body, and that tells me that it corresponds to something very deep in me, and that I need to pursue it.”

And for me, that never-fail-catalyst, is misty rain.

I’m walking cross town. Tuesday morning.

Riffs of Sally Rooney’s new book Normal People flash by…I’m transported to place I’ve never been, but I’m walking, in Dublin, on cobblestone streets. “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.”

I cross Madison. And it begins. Continue reading “Walking Cross Town. With Ooga-Chaka Ooga-Ooga.” →