Top 40 Marina Keegan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”

— Marina Keegan

2. “Let’s make something happen to this world.”

— Marina Keegan

3. “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

4. “What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over.”

— Marina Keegan

5. “I will live for love and the rest will take care of itself.”

— Marina Keegan

6. “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

7. “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

8. “The middle of the universe is tonight, is here, And everything behind is a sunk cost.”

— Marina Keegan

9. “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

10. “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

11. “I’m trying to figure out if I love art enough to be poor.”

— Marina Keegan

12. “And I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short.”

— Marina Keegan

13. “I finally understood the addiction of self-deprivation.”

— Marina Keegan

14. “They try to fight the waves, but they can’t fight the moon. They can’t fight the world’s rotation or the bathymetry of oceans or the inevitability that sometimes things just don’t work out.”

— Marina Keegan

15. “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

16. “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

17. “When a young person dies, much of the tragedy lies in her promise: what she would have done.”

— Marina Keegan

18. “There are so many places I still want to go, so many things I still want to do!”

— Marina Keegan

19. “We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating.”

— Marina Keegan

20. “I’m so jealous. Unthinkable jealousies, jealousies of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel I’m reading and the Oscar- winning movie I just saw. Why didn’t I think to rewrite Mrs. Dalloway? I should have thought to chronicle a schizophrenic ballerina. It’s inexcusable. Everyone else is so successful, and I hate them.”

— Marina Keegan

21. “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

22. “We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my high school self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.”

— Marina Keegan

23. “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

24. “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

25. “I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There’s less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting too involved. In war movies, a thousand soldiers can die gruesomely, but when the horse is shot, the audience is heartbroken. It’s the My Dog Skip effect. The Homeward Bound syndrome.”

— Marina Keegan

26. “Aging is harder for beautiful people, and Anna was beautiful.”

— Marina Keegan

27. “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

28. “I remember finding it extremely hard to open presents as a child because the requisite theatricality was too exhausting.”

— Marina Keegan

29. “Whales feel cohesion, a sense of community, of loyalty. The distress call of a lone whale is enough to prompt its entire pod to rush to its side- a gesture that lands them nose to nose in the same sand. It’s a fatal symphony of echolocation, a siren call to the sympathetic.”

— Marina Keegan

30. “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

31. “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

32. “The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious.”

— Marina Keegan

33. “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

34. “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

35. “I suppose that without a God, NASA is my anti-nihilism.”

— Marina Keegan

36. “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

37. “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

38. “I thought I’d be helping the world, not ignoring it.”

— Marina Keegan

39. “Secretly, of course, the pauses in our correspondence were as calculated as our casualness.”

— Marina Keegan

40. “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

41. “Everyone else is so successful, and I hate them.”

— Marina Keegan

42. “No one quite believed in God and no one quite didn’t.”

— Marina Keegan

43. “High on their posthumous pedestals, the dead become hard to see. Grief, deference, and the homogenizing effects of adulation blur the details, flatten the bumps, sand off the sharp corners.”

— Marina Keegan