Marina Keegan Quotes & Sayings

Everyone else is so successful, and I hate them. — Marina Keegan

My car was not gross; it was occupied, cluttered, cramped. It became an extension of my bedroom, and thus an extension of myself. I had two bumper stickers on the back: REPUBLICANS FOR VOLDEMORT and the symbol for the Equal Rights Campaign. On the back side windows were OBAMA '08 signs that my parents made me take down because they "dangerously blocked my sight lines." The trunk housed my guitar but was also the library, filled with textbooks and novels, the giant tattered copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and all one hundred chapters of Harry Potter on tape. — Marina Keegan

There are so many places I still want to go, so many things I still want to do! — Marina Keegan

We're so young. We're so young. We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There's this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out - that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it's too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement. — Marina Keegan

something about the stillness or my state of mind reminded me of the world's remarkable capacity to carry on in every place at once. — Marina Keegan

Sorry about that," Tommy finally says. "Sometimes I just feel so goddamn angry at people." He forcefully takes off his sailor's hat and tucks it into his bag. He breathes in deeply and, after a pause, relaxes into a smile. "Whatever. I don't want to talk about it. No one will want to read about all my stupid emotional stuff. No one cares. — Marina Keegan

These tiny groups that make us feel loved and save and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers - partnerless, tired, awake. We won't have those next year. We won't live on the same block as all our friends. We won't have a bunch of group texts.
This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse, I'm scared of losing this web we're in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now. — Marina Keegan

Everything will be destroyed no matter how hard we work to create it. The idea terrifies me. I want tiny permanents. I want gigantic permanents! I want what I think and who I am captured in an anthology of indulgence I can comfortingly tuck into a shelf in some labyrinthine library. — Marina Keegan

I'm just tired. I'm tired all the time. I wake up and I'm tired, I go to sleep and I'm tired. — Marina Keegan

Fifty stranded whales are a tangible crisis with a visible solution. There's camaraderie in the process, a Free Willy fantasy, an image of Flipper in everyone's mind. There's nothing romantic about waking up a man on a park bench and making him walk to a shelter. — Marina Keegan

What bothers me is this idea of validation, of rationalization. The notion that some of us (regardless of what we tell ourselves) are doing this because we are not sure what else to do and it's easy to apply to and it will pay us decently and it will make us feel like we're still successful. — Marina Keegan

16. The last paragraphs of individual stories are worth careful examination and rereading. What details does Keegan set up earlier in each piece to make these endings particularly powerful? How does she seal each story while still using a light hand? When does she allow ambiguity? Which ending do you see as most effective, and why? — Marina Keegan

Within a week, "The Opposite of Loneliness," an essay that had appeared in the graduation issue of the Yale Daily News, had been read by more than a million people. "We're so young. We're so young," Marina had written. "We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time." When a young person dies, much of the tragedy lies in her promise: what she would have done. But Marina left what she had already done: an entire body of writing, far more than could fit between these covers. As her parents and friends and I gathered her work, trying to find the most recent version of every story and essay, we knew that none of it was in exactly the form she would have wanted to publish. She was a demon reviser, rewriting and rewriting and rewriting even when everyone else thought something was done. (THERE CAN ALWAYS BE A BETTER THING.) We knew we couldn't rewrite her work; only she could have done that. — Marina Keegan

I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There's less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting to involved. — Marina Keegan

The biggest fight in my relationship with Danny regards his absurd claim that he invited the popular middle school phenomenon of saying "cha-cha-cha" after each phrase of the Happy Birthday song- an idea his ingenious sixth-grade brain allegedly spawned in a New Jersey Chuck E. Cheese and watched spread across 1993 America with an unprecedented rapidity. — Marina Keegan

The middle of the universe is tonight, is here, And everything behind is a sunk cost. — Marina Keegan

We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that's what I want in life. — Marina Keegan

But it became clear very quickly that I'd underestimated how much I liked him. Not him, perhaps, but the fact that I had someone on the other end of an invisible line. Someone to update and get updates from, to inform of a comic discovery, to imagine while dancing in a lonely basement, and to return to, finally, when the music stopped. — Marina Keegan

People are strange about animals. Especially large ones. Daily, on the docks of Wellfleet Harbor, thousands of fish are scaled, gutted, and seasoned with thyme and lemon. No one strokes their sides with water. No one cries when their jaws slip open. Pilot whales are not an endangered species, yet people spend tens of thousands of dollars in rescue efforts, trucking the wounded to aquariums and in some places even airlifting them off beaches. — Marina Keegan

What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. — Marina Keegan

Brian's death was the clearest and most horrifying example of my terrific obsession with the unattainable. Alive, his biggest flaw was most likely that he liked me. Dead, his perfections were clearer. — Marina Keegan

When a young person dies, much of the tragedy lies in her promise: what she would have done. — Marina Keegan

She had the rare combination of being quiet and popular, a code that made her intimidating to younger, fashionable girls and mysterious to older, confident boys. — Marina Keegan

It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe. — Marina Keegan

Yet above all this, she insists on vigilance. Gluten is hiding everywhere in everything, and even the tiniest crumb - the tiniest crumb of a crumb - could get me sick. It's more important than the mere stomach issues; failure to follow a gluten-free diet grossly increases one's chances of developing thyroid cancer, diabetes, and other life-threatening diseases. These, she taught me, are the real reasons to check and double-check. The reasons she uses separate pasta strainers and knives. I learned to read labels for hidden ingredients, to call the company and ask the source of the caramel color and the modified food starch. To avoid foods fried in the same oil that had fried breaded meat. To speak with chefs at restaurants and ask to use a clean part of the grill, a clean salad bowl, a flourless dressing. We were careful. We were the best. And at home I never, ever got sick. — Marina Keegan

I talked a lot in my car. Thousands of words and songs and swears are absorbed in its fabric, just like the orange juice I spilled on my way to the dentist. It knows what happened, when Allie went to Puerto Rico, understands the difference between the way I look at Nick and the way I look at Adam, and remembers the first time I experimented with talking to myself. — Marina Keegan

Secretly, of course, the pauses in our correspondence were as calculated as our casualness. — Marina Keegan

So what I'm trying to say is you should text me back. Because there's a precedent. Because there's an urgency. Because there's a bedtime. Because when the world ends I might not have my phone charged and If you don't respond soon, I won't know if you'd wanna leave your shadow next to mine. — Marina Keegan

Most firms are looking for people who will stay up until three A.M. seven nights a week making slides for a partner who goes home to Wellesley for dinner every night at five P.M. - and who will do so thinking that they're 'winning.' Look at it this way: most firms assume that you'll leave for law school or business school within three years, and they invest in your training accordingly. Quality mentoring when you're young is worth whatever you pay for it. Sometimes that means less money, sometimes that means less of a life beyond work. But quality mentoring is not going to be delivered by someone who is twenty-six, and just one tidal cycle ahead of you. — Marina Keegan

I blame the Internet. Its inconsiderate inclusion of everything.Success is transparent and accessible, hanging down where it can tease but not touch us. We talk into these scratchy microphones and take extra photographs but I still feel like there are just SO MANY PEOPLE. Every day, 1,035.6 books are published; sixty-six million people update their status each morning. At night, aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of elementary school murals. One person can make a difference! But the people asking me what I want to be when I grow up don't want me to make a poster anymore. They want me to fill out forms and hand them rectangular cards that say HELLO THIS IS WHAT I DO. — Marina Keegan

I have seen too many young writers give up because they couldn't handle the repeated failures their profession threw at them. They had talent, but they lacked determination and resilience. Marina had all three, and that's why I am certain she would have succeeded. — Marina Keegan

Let's make something happen to this world. — Marina Keegan

I want to watch Shloe's movies and I want to see Mark's musicals and I want to volunteer with Joe's nonprofit and eat at Annie's restaurant and send my kids to schools Jeff has reformed and I'm just scared about this industry that's taking all my friends and telling them this is the best way for them to be spending their time. Any of their time. — Marina Keegan

We're our own hardest critics and it's easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. — Marina Keegan

I suppose that without a God, NASA is my anti-nihilism. — Marina Keegan

I got a personal e-mail and went to their event because I couldn't believe that they were interested in me and I wanted to find out why," she said. But when she got there, she wasn't sure why she'd come in the first place. "I looked around and felt that I not only didn't belong with the group of people but that I didn't believe in what the organization stands for or does," she said. "There's definitely a compulsion element to it. You feel like so many people are doing it and talking about it all the time like it's interesting, so you start to wonder if maybe it really is. — Marina Keegan

It's not quite love and it's not quite community; it's just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it's four A.M. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can't remember. That time we did, we went , we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats. — Marina Keegan

We have these impossibly high standards and we'll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that's okay. — Marina Keegan

I thought I'd be helping the world, not ignoring it. — Marina Keegan

I want enough time to be in love with everything ... — Marina Keegan

My father used to tease me at the table by implying that "cold Claire" had brought in the draft. I had three older sisters, all beautiful, and I was always less affected than them, slow to smile. I remember finding it extremely hard to open presents as a child because the requisite theatricality was too exhausting. My sisters forever humiliated me over a moment in fifth grade when I'd opened a present from my grandmother and declared, straight-faced, "I already have this. — Marina Keegan

Aging is harder for beautiful people, and Anna was beautiful. — Marina Keegan

Do you wanna leave soon?
No, I want enough time to be in love with everything ...
And I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short. — Marina Keegan

As far as other important people go, university president Richard Levin believes "there are many ways to contribute to the well-being of society, and there are many forms of public service." He rejects the notion that "people who choose a business career aren't interested in being public-spirited," asserting that "what's outstanding about Yale graduates is that whatever career they choose, they end up being active participants in the civic life of the communities in which they live. — Marina Keegan

Since the tragedy of Marina's death, her parents have heard from strangers around the globe surprised to find themselves writing to share the impact of "meeting" Marina through her words: Jewish teenagers visiting a series of concentration camps while on "The March of the Living" and finding specific comfort and renewed purpose in her writings; college peers living more mindfully; musicians writing songs inspired by her; older readers making midlife recalibrations and career changes, whether they are returning to school or shifting to a nonprofit or finishing that manuscript; people simply rediscovering a sense of hope. These new life paths all build from Marina's own sense that it's never too late to change, that we must take action, that we are indeed "in this together. — Marina Keegan

20. The day she graduated from college, Keegan told her mother that she was especially proud of her Yale Daily News article "Even Artichokes Have Doubts," which went on to be adapted for the New York Times and discussed on NPR. When The Opposite of Loneliness was first published in April 2014, columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, "Keegan was right to prod us all to reflect on what we seek from life, to ask these questions, to recognize the importance of passions as well as paychecks - even if there are no easy answers." As Keegan reminds other young people that "we can do something really cool to this world" (p. 200), what points does she emphasize? What counterarguments might she have considered more specifically? Do you share her concern about where so many top young graduates take their first jobs? Do you worry that you need to compromise your own dreams for practical concerns? Why or why not? — Marina Keegan

We push and shove and wet whales all day, then walk home through town past homeless men curled up on benches - washed up like whales on the curbsides. Pulled outside by the moon and struggling for air among the sewers. They're suffocating too, but there's no town assembly line of food. No palpable urgency, no airlifting plane. — Marina Keegan

My brother laughed at my nostalgia, reminding me that I could still drive the car when I came home. He didn't understand that it wasn't just the driving I'd miss. That it was the tinfoil balls, the New York Times, and the broken speaker; the fingernail marks, the stray cassettes, and the smell of chai. Alone that night and parked in my driveway, I listened to Frank Sinatra with the moon roof slid back. — Marina Keegan

I miss dreaming forwards," Anna said.
"What?"
"I dream backwards now. You won't believe how backwards you'll dream someday. — Marina Keegan

But everything was so instantly, remarkably different. I was shocked. Literally incapable of comprehending what I'd seen. I felt stabbed, like the air was forced out of my chest, and I looked at him aghast, hurt, shut behind walls. It was unfathomable to me. The game didn't matter. The stakes were so low. There was no part of me that would - could - ever consider doing what he did. But it was so easy for him. The easiest thing. And that, I realized, had been there all along. — Marina Keegan

If you're like most people, you'll do one thing for two to three years, then something else for two to three years, and then - somewhere in that five- to seven-year distance from Yale - you'll see a need to fully commit to something that's a longer-term project: graduate school, for example, or a job you need to stick with for some real time. The question is: where do you need to be with yourself such that when the time comes to 'cast your whole vote,' you're reasonably confident you're not being either fear-based or ego-driven in your choice . . . that the journey you're on is really yours, and not someone else's? If you think of your first few jobs after Yale in this way - holistically and in terms of your growth as a person rather than as ladder rungs to a specific material outcome - you're less likely to wake up at age forty-five married to a stranger." Yikes! — Marina Keegan

The game meandered on and stories began to take over. It was getting late but going to bed meant good-bye so we pushed forward — Marina Keegan

I read somewhere that radio waves just keep traveling outward, flying into the universe with eternal vibrations. Sometime before I die I think I'll find a microphone and climb to the top of a radio tower. I'll take a deep breath and close my eye because it will start to rain right when I reach the top. Hello, I'll say to outer space, this is my card. — Marina Keegan

We can't, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it's all we have. — Marina Keegan

I figured I wasn't supposed to be capable of that kind of thinking, and I felt like an alien. I feel that a lot, actually, in a lot of circumstances. Like I ought to be feeling something I don't. — Marina Keegan

The notion that it's too late to do anything is comical. It's hilarious. — Marina Keegan

I remember finding it extremely hard to open presents as a child because the requisite theatricality was too exhausting. — Marina Keegan

... the addiction of self-deprivation ... — Marina Keegan

Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes...). We have these impossibly high standards and we'll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that's okay.
We're so young. We're so young. We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time. — Marina Keegan

I'm trying to figure out if I love art enough to be poor. — Marina Keegan

When the moon gets bored, it kills whales. Blue whales and fin whales and humpback, sperm, and orca whales: centrifugal forces don't discriminate. — Marina Keegan

I feel like we can do something really cool to this world. And I fear - at twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five - we might forget. — Marina Keegan

I'm still struggling with the fact that due to my own (selfish) desire to be a writer, my children probably won't have the same opportunities I had growning up. For most students, however, I genuinely think it's about the money. It's a factor, sure. But it just feels like a factor. — Marina Keegan

I'm scared of losing this web we're in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. — Marina Keegan

So is there anything intrinsically wrong with the fact that 25 percent of employed Yale graduates end up in this industry? Yeah. I think so. Of course this is my own opinion, but to me there's something sad about so many of us entering a line of work in which we're not (for the most part) producing something, or helping someone, or engaging in something that we're explicitly passionate about. Even if it's just for two or three years. That's a lot of years! And these aren't just years. This is twenty-three and twenty-four and twenty-five. If it were a smaller percentage of people, perhaps it wouldn't bother me so much. But it's not. — Marina Keegan

Each word that she left behind is precious, including the simple three I rediscovered a few days after Marina's memorial service. Her long-forgotten note, scrawled with a dry-erase marker on the back of a BB&N book slip and left on my desk when she was visiting from college, simply read, "Marina was here!" Marina was here. Yes, she was, in so many ways. And with an exclamation point. My hope is that through this book and Marina's many legacies, we may all still hear her and be inspired by how she used her fleeting time to be passionately, vibrantly, fully here. - Beth McNamara August 2014 — Marina Keegan

I used to think printing things made them permanent, but that seems so silly now. Everything will be destroyed no matter how hard we work to create it. The idea terrifies me. I want tiny permanents. I want gigantic permanents! I want what I think and who I am captured in an anthology of indulgence I can comfortingly tuck into a shelf in some labyrinthine library. Everyone thinks they're special - my grandma for her Marlboro commercials, my parents for discos and the moon. You can be anything, they tell us. No one else is quite like you. But I searched my name on Facebook and got eight tiny pictures staring back. The Marina Keegans with their little hometowns and relationship statuses. When we die, our gravestones will match. HERE LIES MARINA KEEGAN, they will say. Numbers one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. — Marina Keegan

I confessed that they were too hard to follow, and the summer before my sophomore fall, she sought to fully transform Yale's food-allergy plan. With her credentials from Boston Children's Hospital, she arranged meetings with our head chefs and supervisors, getting gluten-free cereals and bagels in dining halls, adding "gluten" labels on every dish's information cards. It was unbelievable. It was impressive. Watching her make calls, I could see her eyes smile with the smallest hint of pride. — Marina Keegan

Growing up with an exterminator as a father was always slightly embarrassing for Anna and her brother, Kevin. "I remember," Tommy begins, "one year when Anna was about eight, and it was 'bring your daughter to work day.' That was a big thing back in the eighties," he chuckles. "Well, I remember Anna came down to breakfast that morning and told me she didn't want to come." Tommy half smiles, but shakes his head slightly and closes his eyes for a second. " 'Dad-dyyy, bugs are nasty. Why can't you be a pilot or a doctor or something cool like that?' I didn't even argue with her, I just let her go to school." Tommy sighs, "I told her I was sorry I didn't have a cooler job. — Marina Keegan

Oftentimes at Yale, I'll be sitting around studying or drinking or hanging out when I'll hear one of my friends talk about a project they're doing for a class or a rally they're organizing or a play they're putting on. And I'll just think, really, honestly, how remarkably privileged we are to hang around with such a talented group of people around here. I am constantly reminded of the immense passion and creativity of those with whom I get to spend time every day. — Marina Keegan

The best years of our lives are not behind us. They're part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn't live in New York. — Marina Keegan

I saw everything in the world build up and then everything in the world fall down again. — Marina Keegan