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On a bit of a whim, I decided to read Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, and I’m so happy I did.
The book pulled me in right away, and I ended up loving every page.
There’s something about the way Rooney writes that feels so real, especially when it comes to the characters and their emotions.
I’m planning to write a full review soon, but in the meantime, I couldn’t resist sharing some of the best quotes that really resonated with me.
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What is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney About?
This is a heartfelt story about two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, dealing with their father’s death in different ways.
Peter, a successful lawyer, is struggling with his relationships and using sleep medication to cope.
Ivan, a 22-year-old chess player, feels socially awkward but finds connection with Margaret, an older woman with her own complicated past.
Both brothers, along with the people they care about, go through a time of grief, love, and self-discovery, trying to manage the emotions that come with loss.
Best Quotes from Intermezzo by Sally Rooney for Everyone
1. “She has been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of ordinary life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person.”
2. “When he saw her waiting for him at the gate: to encounter not only her, the beauty of her nearness renewed, but also himself, the self that is loved by her, and therefore worthy of his own respect.”
3. “But I’m very happy that I met you. And even knowing that you’re alive, I feel like my life will be a lot better. Just being able to remember – being with you, and having such a nice experience together.”
4. “It doesn’t always work, but I do my best. See what happens. Go on in any case living.”
5. “The will to live so much stronger than anyone imagines. Like a kind of death, what happened. A kind of death you survive out of politeness, respect for others, out of selfless love. Christ also survived his own death. And was dignified and exalted.”
6. “You can drive yourself crazy thinking about different things you could have done in the past.”
7. “How often in life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him.”
9. “Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you.”
10. “Quietly they look at one another. Love at times indistinguishable from hatred.”
11. “She lets out a trembling kind of laugh. ‘Well, if there is a God,’ she says, ‘I’m sure he loves you very much.’ He lowers his eyes. ‘Yeah, I can feel that sometimes,’ he says. ‘Like when I’m with you, I can. If you don’t mind me saying that.'”
12. “Nonetheless, it is better to feel hopeful and optimistic about one’s life on earth while engaged in the never-ending struggle to pay rent, than to feel despondent and depressed while engaged in the same non-optional struggle anyway.”
13. “To do what little good he can with his life. To ask for nothing more, to bow his head, pitifully grateful, God’s humble and grateful servant. Can he imagine anything less like himself? And yet here he is, defeated, relieved, forgiving everything, praying only to be forgiven.”
14. “But sometimes I think, actually, I didn’t have that much power over my life anyway. I mean, I couldn’t give myself a new personality out of nothing. And things just kind of happened to me.”
15. “What does it mean to love someone, then? I’m curious. If you don’t care about the person’s feelings, and you’re not nice to them, and you don’t really want them to be happy, how is that love, in your opinion? Maybe we have different definitions.”
16. “For Peter, social systems are never confusing, always transparent, and usually manipulable to his own ends. He is someone who not only knows a vast number of people, but through knowing them can somehow make them do things he wants them to do.”
17. “Nobody when they’re rejected believes it’s really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction — which even makes sense from an evolutionary perspective — is simply the strangest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.”
18. “And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good?”
19. “Yes, the world makes room for goodness and decency, he thinks: and the task of life is to show goodness to others, not to complain about their failings.”
20. “The most distressing thing about Bridget’s attitude to Margaret, and especially towards her marriage, is not the belief that Bridget is being cruel, so much as the suspicion, bred in the bone, a lifelong instinct, but after all she might be right. Can the deep childhood impulse to trust one’s mother, to agree with her against oneself, ever be wrestled down by the comparatively thin force of reasoned argument?”
22. “There is more to life than great chess. Okay, great chess is still a part of life, and it can be a very big part, very intense, satisfying, and pleasant to dwell on in the mind’s eye: but nonetheless, life contains many things.”
23. “Well, if that’s suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Yes. To love whoever I have left. And if ever I lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my life.”
24. “He doesn’t want after all for others to be poor, doesn’t even want to be rich. No. He only wants what he has always wanted: to be right, to be once and for all proven right.”
26. “Once you meet your soulmate, there’s no point pretending, is there? Feeling of solace you get when she’s near you. To live the right life.”
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27. “In nature, he thinks, there is no such thing as ugliness. It’s like he tried to tell Margaret in the car, beauty belongs to god, and ugliness to human beings.”
28. “What if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”
29. “But when I experience that sense of beauty, it does make me believe in God. Like there’s a meaning behind everything.”
30. “I just want to say, I’m on your side. I know I’ve never done anything to help you, Ivan, but in principle, in spirit. I’ve been on your side all along.”
31. “From that so firmly suppressed feeling, present all along, that when he looks at her, when he speaks to her, he is addressing not only the superficial but also the deep concealed parts of her personality – without meaning to, without knowing how not to.”
32. “To remember that God is not the nice man Jesus, who liked everybody and went around healing the sick; that God is, on the contrary, the one who makes people sick, who condemns people to death, for incomprehensible reasons.”
33. “The inevitability of death. Meaningless existence, false scaffold of morality assembled around nothing. The final permanent nothing that is the only truth.”
36. “Didn’t human sexuality at its base always involve a pathetic sort of throbbing insecurity, awful to contemplate?”
37. “If being around his brother makes him feel bad, why should he have to do it? On the other hand, it strikes her as some kind of imperative, perhaps even a law of nature, that people should do their best for one another in times of grief.”
38. “Nothing he has done or felt in this regard before has prepared him remotely for this new experience, with Margaret: the experience of mutual desire.”
39. “We’re being hard on ourselves in a way, he remarks, because both our lives involve some voluntary exposure to what other people might call defeat. Which I think requires a certain degree of courage.”
40. “The demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more of life.”
41. “Money overall is a very exploitative substance, creating, it seems, fresh kinds of exploitation in every form of relationality through which it passes. Greasing with exploitation the wheels of human interaction generally.”
42. “To descend into a futile rage, to be aware of all that I have left, is not only a pain but a joy to be embraced, unrelenting.”
43. “And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good?”
44. “The most distressing thing about Bridget’s attitude to Margaret, and especially towards her marriage, is not the belief that Bridget is being cruel, so much as the suspicion, bred in the bone, a lifelong instinct, that after all, she might be right. Can the deep childhood impulse to trust one’s mother, to agree with her against oneself, ever be wrestled down by the comparatively thin force of reasoned argument?”
45. “The inexchangeable pleasure of her conversation. Just to walk the streets saying things, anything, just the act itself, walking together at the same speed, and talking, purely to amuse and please one another, to make each other stupidly laugh, for no further accomplishment, no higher purpose, to let their words rise and disperse forever in the damp brackish air.”
46. “Nothing he has done or felt in this regard before has prepared him remotely for this new experience, with Margaret: the experience of mutual desire.”
47. “Didn’t human sexuality at its base always involve a pathetic sort of throbbing insecurity, awful to contemplate?”
48. “To descend into a futile rage, to be aware of all that I have left, is not only a pain but a joy to be embraced, unrelenting.”
49. “The inevitability of death. Meaningless existence, false scaffold of morality assembled around nothing. The final permanent nothing that is the only truth.”
50. “Money overall is a very exploitative substance, creating, it seems, fresh kinds of exploitation in every form of relationality through which it passes. Greasing with exploitation the wheels of human interaction generally.”
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I hope you enjoyed these quotes as much as I did.
Intermezzo is a book that sticks with you, and there’s so much more to explore in its pages.
I can’t wait to share my full review with you soon, but in the meantime, feel free to check out some of my other related posts.
