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Friends
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“There's some to whom you can and should turn your soul inside out. It ain't what you say that matters but who you tells it to.”
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“There is nothing better than the encouragement of a good friend.”
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“ ... for someone such as myself, who is kind of feckless and immature, it's better to have rich friends than to be rich yourself, because then you have wealth without the responsibility. You get to go to their houses, and you get acquainted with a level of furniture that you cannot provide for yourself. Furniture, I think is the most important attribute of rich people.”
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“It's very important when making a friend to check and see if they have a private plane. People think a good personality trait in a friend is kindness or a sense of humor. No, in a friend a good personality trait is a Gulfstream.”
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“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I go to my friends ... ”
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“It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.”
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“When we are prosperous, our friends know us; when we are poor, we know our friends.”
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“Friends are the thermometers by which one may judge the temperature of our fortunes.”
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“Best friend, my wellspring in the wilderness!”
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“It is necessary to me, not simply to be but to utter, and I require utterance of my friends.”
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“Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.”
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“It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibres that knit us to the old.”
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“It is always the best friends who are neglected and ignored.”
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“I was a very introverted child. I only had two friends. And they were imaginary. And they would only play with each other.”
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“One does not permit one's friends to be slandered in time of trouble.”
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“The kinds of good friends I have are people who are perfectly willing to have me say I'll see them in six months, and live right next door.”
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“New minds have come to reveal themselves to me, though I do not wish it, for I feel myself inadequate to the ties already formed. I have not strength or time to do anything as I would, or meet the thoughts of those I love already. But these new have come with gifts too fair to be refused and which have cheered my passive mind.”
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“I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.”
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“Friends are the family we choose for ourselves.”
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“True friends are those who really know you but love you anyway.”
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“Give me one friend, just one, who meets / The needs of all my varying moods. ”
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“Life without a friend is death without a witness ...”
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“Friends are the twenty-first-century version of extended families.”
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“In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving — instead of actually getting up and leaving.”
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“Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.”
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“It has been always held for a special principle in friendship that prosperity provideth but adversity proveth friends ...”
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“There are very few honest friends — the demand is not particularly great.”
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“In meeting again after a separation, acquaintances ask after our outward life, friends after our inner life.”
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“We had been talking as old friends should talk, about nothing, about everything.”
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“It seemed to him that friends were part of the indestructible tapestry of one's life, that no matter if a thread disappeared there, it would eventually reappear here, or in some other place in the design, as long as it was a thread that mattered.”
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“Her friends represented the cast of a legitimate play, which hardly ever exceeds a moderate number, since a theme cannot be crisply expounded by too many mouths, but his friends represented the cast of a Follies show, which, debating no particular point, but stirring certain large loose fantasies of delight in the lower levels of the mind, can be as numerous as the hosts of a dream.”
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“... each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
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“I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.”
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“Relations are errors that Nature makes. / Your spouse you can put on the shelf. / But your friends, dear friends, are the quaint mistakes / You always commit yourself.”
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“There is nothing like a good friend to help you out when you are not in trouble.”
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“The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.”
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“... sparks electric only strike / On souls electrical alike; / The flash of intellect expires, / Unless it meet congenial fires ...”
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“Indeed, I have, alas! outlived almost every one of my contemporaries. One pays dear for living long.”
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“Old Friends can never be forgotten by me.”
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“My friends are my estate.”
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“I felt it shelter to speak to you.”
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“The friend anguish reveals is the slowest forgot.”
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“Next to God, the best thing is a true-hearted and high-minded friend.”
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“Kinder the enemy who must malign us, / Than the smug friend who will define us.”
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“John felt for the moment exactly the mingled pleasure and embarrassment that a man does who has been adopted by an unusually nice dog. It is a compliment, but one doesn't know exactly what to do with the animal.”
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“Why is it that the people with whom one loves to be silent are also the very ones with whom one loves to talk?”
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“Newish friends, if they get ghastly, can be weighed and found wanting, but you'd never do a thing like that to old ones; their terrible habits are just part of the universe.”
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“Such friends as have been absent long / more joyful be at meeting / Than those which ever present are / and daily have their greeting.”
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“Ruth has friends like other people have wardrobes. I mean that there's someone for every occasion.”
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“Help[ing] one another is part of the religion of our sisterhood ...”
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“Nobody, but nobody / Can make it out here alone.”
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“Between friends there is no bribery. ... the relationship of friends is intrinsically fair and equal. Neither feels stronger or more clever or more beautiful than the other.”
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“There's a kind of emotional exploration you plumb with a friend that you don't really do with your family.”
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“... a friend can tell you things you don't want to tell yourself.”
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“All joy seems more delightful, all sorrow seems more tolerable, when our friend shares our joys and sorrow with us.”
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“We've been insufferable friends for years.”
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“The ideal life is that which has few friends, but many acquaintances.”
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“An old friend is like an old chair. One delights in it — one finds shelter within its kindly arms.”
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“Friends and good manners will carry you where money won't go.”
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“Only equals dare tell each other the truth.”
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“The loss of friends is a tax on age!”
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“... none but the unhappy are worthy of friends; if your soul had never suffered never could you have entered mine.”
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“The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.”
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“Life, for me, is living among my friends.”
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“You can be a nuisance to your family. You mustn't be a nuisance to your friends.”
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“Imagination bound us stronger than love. Within its limitless borders we launched ships and love affairs, discovered lost worlds, made buildings and babies, found husbands, wrote letters and Broadway plays. We made ourselves up everyday.”
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“Sometimes we choose a friend who mirrors our fantasies, dreams of a self we wish we could be.”
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“We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.”
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“I'm told some people no longer bother to have friends at all — can't fit them in.”
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“There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.”
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“[On friends:] It's the ones you can call up at 4:00 a.m. that matter.”
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“Went out last night / With a crowd of my friends / They must have been women / 'Cause I don't like no men ...”
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“May our house always be too small to hold all our friends.”
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“The friends you love the most are the ones you laugh with.”
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“Certainly, friends are sufficiently rare not to be neglected; they are life's best comforters.”
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“Poets never die — nor friends either, I assure you, monsieur. Neither death nor silence in reality changes the soul.”
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“My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.”
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“But just as delicate fare does not stop you from craving pig-brain sausage, so tried and exquisite friendship does not take away your taste for something new and dubious.”
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“What a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised!”
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“Our best loved friend is always in some way our peer.”
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“... the friend in need is the one who is the friend in deed; ... if people were not friends in need, there was every likelihood that they never would be friends again in any conditions that might obtain.”
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“Anything might happen now / Since at last you are my friend!”
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“However deep our devotion may be to parents, or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire ...”
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“... they were large ladies of great presence and vast dignity. Ladies in hairnets. Ladies with both slippers on the floor. ... Sitting abreast in strings of three or four, they leaned to speak, to listen, and to nod their heads emphatically at one another. They agreed, they said. Only too true, they were afraid. No question about it, no two ways of looking at it. That much is certain. The fact is. Without a doubt.”
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“Treat your friends as you do your pictures, and place them in their best light.”
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“My theory is that you find out who your true friends are when something good happens to you, not when something bad happens to you. Everybody loves you when something bad happens to you. Then you're easy to love.”
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“Friends are people who help you be more yourself, more the person you are intended to be, and it is possible that without them we don't recognize ourselves, or grow to be what it is in us to be.”
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“The job of a friend is not to decide what should be done, not to run interference or pick up the slack. The job of a friend is to understand, and to supply energy and hope, and in doing so to keep those they value on their feet a little longer, so that they can fight another round and grow strong in themselves.”
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“Friends are like windows through which you see out into the world and back into yourself, so they are very important to how one views one's life, and if you don't have friends you see much less than you otherwise might.”
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“Even where the affections are not strongly moved by any superior excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.”
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“Parents are friends that life gives us; friends are parents that the heart chooses.”
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“Perhaps we always love our friends best when they are a little unfortunate; not too happy, not too well, not too rich.”
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“Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world.”
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“If we grow old wisely, we lay aside the senseless forms and meaningless conventions of society and go back to a more primitive mode of social intercourse, picking our friends the way children do, — because we like them, — spending time enough with them to get some real good out of them.”
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“You have to reach out to people. To your family too. You can't just let them sit there, you should put your hand out. If they slap it back, well you reach out again if you care enough.”
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“The richer your friends, the more they will cost you.”
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“But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”
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“Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of ...”
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“Life seems somehow less shocking, painful, and lonely — and more hopeful, agreeable, and beautiful — when our experiences are confirmed by those of others. Although each of us is unique, there are familiar responses and doubts and joys that let us know we have kin. We are not, after all, too strange to live.”
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“She's the kind of woman who'd go through hell, high water, or a paper shredder for a pal.”
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“Friends tell the truth to one another. Friends don't slam the door to correction or reflection when it is offered with affection.”
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“I have learned to the last letter that friends are friends just so long as you don't need them. When you do they take wings and fly away.”
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“A friend in need needs a friend, indeed.”
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“The people we meet, especially the friends we keep, are sent to us for the mutual purpose of support and discovery.”
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“It's you' friends that do you — you' enemies cain' get to you.”
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“Friends aren't any more important than breath or blood to a high school senior.”
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“A conscience is a troublesome thing at times. I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning and I spent the time feeling what a nothing I was, and wishing I was so very different. Then the morning's post brought me a letter from a friend, saying I was so this, so that — it made me really cry, I was so grateful.”
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“Funny, you don't look like a friend — ah, but they never do.”
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“A friend in need is a friend indeed.”
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“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
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“Friends have a way of speaking without words.”
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“Never expect too much from a friend and you will never want for one.”
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“A friend is one who withholds judgment no matter how long you have his unanswered letter.”
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“Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.”
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“I don't think any woman in power really has a happy life unless she's got a large number of women friends ... because you sometimes must go and sit down and let down your hair with someone you can trust totally.”
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“The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death. / The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.”
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“A friend is someone you can call in the middle of the night when your man is gone, or you wish he would go, or you suspect your cellulite is winning — or even just to prove to yourself that there is someone you can call in the middle of the night.”
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“It's smart to be friends with one's sex partner but dumb to have sex with one's friends.”
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“... one keeps one's friends better when one is alone. The corollary to this is that one loses one's friends, slowly, when one sees them too often or when they visit for too long a time.”
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“Now I'm searching for a slightly overweight, single, childless woman who doesn't have a date and isn't too depressing to be around. It's getting harder to find a girlfriend than a boyfriend.”
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“Friends make good furniture and easy windows.”
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“It is pleasant to have people love you even when they don't know you; but of far more value is the love of a friend who knows you and still loves you.”
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“She didn't know how to be friends with more than one person at a time.”
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“God allows people to come into our lives on borrowed time. It's like a friend lending you a sweater. You never know when that friend will ask for the sweater back. And when he or she does, you'll have to return it. The sweater doesn't belong to you and neither do the people in your life. God only lends them to us on borrowed time for a special reason.”
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“A friend of the heart is one who perceives me as one of the better versions of myself. We make good music, this friend and I, and good silences, too.”
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“I don't really believe in pretending to be happy when you're not. Mostly I believe that you should burden your friends with your problems.”
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“Friends. Our lifeline to the world of sociability; without them we would lead very cloistered lives indeed.”
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“Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.”
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“To be a friend takes time, and time is what nobody has. Therefore, real friends are rare.”
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“We never know the good we have till constant friends depart / And leave us just with half a life and half a heart.”
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“But every road is tough to me / That has no friend to cheer it.”
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“It was usual for the women of a household to do their own planting; but if a woman was sick, or for some reason was unable to attend to her planting, she sometimes cooked a feast, to which she invited the members of her age society and asked them to plant her field for her.”
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“The balm of life, a kind and faithful friend.”
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“As you grow older, you'll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.”
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“I believe friends enclose us, like a pair of parentheses. Each one knows us differently, each sustains us in a different way.”
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“I didn't realize then that you can't make old friends, that you can only lose them. And in losing them, you lose part of yourself.”
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“One seeks new friends only when too well known by old ones.”
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“Friends are the family we choose.”
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“Calling all sisters. Calling all / Righteous sisters. / Calling all women.”
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“Maud went to college, / Sadie stayed at home. / Sadie scraped life / With a fine-tooth comb.”
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“Gentle ladies, you will remember till old age what we did together in our brilliant youth!”
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“Girlfriends can tell you if your hair color is bad or if your boyfriend lied to you. The interesting thing is, so can your worst enemy. The difference is that your girlfriend does not relish it, and you just know that in your bones.”
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“Friends are a recompense for all the woes of the darkest pages of life.”
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“If you tell a friend a secret, she will keep the secret by telling only one other person.”
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“There are people to whom one need not show off. It’s a great comfort sometimes.”
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“... at our age there's nothing better than conversation with someone who remembers the world you knew when you were a child—and the people in it. It's as good as taking your hair down.”
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“Perhaps what makes friendship and love exciting is the continuing discovery of another personality.”
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“Most people ask of their friends that they understand them, but, on balance, I think I prefer a friend who understands himself.”
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“It's important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to the friendship that we are not.”
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“If you don't have children and you don't have a job, you have time for friendship ... People who have jobs are not the best friends to have. It's better to be friends with people who are unemployed ... ”
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“[Friendships] are easy to get out of compared to love affairs, but they are not easy to get out of compared to, say, jail.”
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“Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing. Who can know the outer ranges of it? Perhaps no human being has ever explored its limits.”
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“When I gave myself a home permanent and left it on too long, she was the only one to sit with me in the bathroom until it grew out. ”
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“Friendships begin with liking or gratitude — roots that can be pulled up.”
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“I am so grieved to hear that Sara does not get better. What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be bye-and-bye. Never mind, the uglier we get in the eyes of others the lovelier we shall be to each other — that has always been my firm faith about friendship, and now it is in a slight degree my experience.”
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“You don't have to write to me if you don't feel like it. There's no real friendship without absolute freedom.”
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“... friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.”
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“Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship.”
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“Friendship is not possible between two women one of whom is very well dressed.”
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“... the longer I live the more am I convinced that connections formed in early childhood are the strongest, the most durable, and the most delightful of all.”
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“Sometimes, with luck, we find the kind of true friend, male or female, that appears only two or three times in a lucky lifetime, one that will winter us and summer us, grieve, rejoice, and travel with us.”
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“In the world of relationships, possibly the most complicated, uncommon, hard to find, hard to keep and most rewarding has got to be friendship.”
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“Silences make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying, but the never needing to say, is what counts.”
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“Though friendship is not quick to burn, / It is explosive stuff ... ”
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“I know you have much to bear with in me, and I really do sometimes in you, but I have never looked at friendship in a deep sense as easy or entirely comfortable.”
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“... friendship is love made bearable.”
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“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but you want someone who'll help you catch the bus.”
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“... time is as adhesive as love, and the more time you spend with someone the greater the likelihood of finding yourself with a permanent sort of thing to deal with that people casually refer to as 'friendship,' as if that were the end of the matter.”
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“A good friendship is a conversation that never ends.”
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“Friendship's a noble Name, 'tis Love refin'd ...”
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“Two may talk together under the same roof for many years, yet never really meet; and two others at first speech are old friends.”
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“... one may be my very good friend, and yet not of my opinion ...”
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“Women's propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.”
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“Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.”
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“Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.”
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“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
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“In real friendship the judgment, the genius, the prudence of each party become the common property of both.”
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“It is the steady and merciless increase of occupations, the augmented speed at which we are always trying to live, the crowding of each day with more work and amusement than it can profitably hold, which has cost us, among other good things, the undisturbed enjoyment of friends. Friendship takes time, and we have no time to give it.”
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“We know when we have had enough of a friend, and we know when a friend has had enough of us. The first truth is no more palatable than the second.”
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“The pleasures of friendship are exquisite, / How pleasant to go to a friend on a visit!”
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“There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.”
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“... what I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?”
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“I always feel that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.”
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“I am treating you as my friend, asking you to share my present minuses in the hope that I can ask you to share my future pluses. ”
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“... often intimacies between women go backwards, beginning with revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem.”
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“The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends.”
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“Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth.”
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“Faithful are the wounds of a friend.”
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“Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded.”
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“... no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world.”
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“... it is cold tonight, but the thought of you so warm, that I sit by it as a fireside, and am never cold any more. I love to write to you — it gives my heart a holiday and sets the bells to ringing.”
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“... do you not feel that sometimes in life one's friendships begin by antipathy — sometimes by indifference — and sometimes by that sudden magnetism of sympathy as if in some former life we had been very near and dear, and were only picking up the threads again, and to such two souls there is no feeling that they are strangers.”
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“What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.”
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“... it is the greatest mistake, both in life and in literature, to suppose that love is the difficult, the complicated thing. It is not love, it is friendship, which is the great problem of civilized society. The other is quite elemental beside it.”
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“Female friendships that work are relationships in which women help each other belong to themselves.”
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“True friendship is never tranquil ...”
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“I want to touch you in real time / not find you on YouTube, / I want to walk next to you in the mountains / not friend you on Facebook. / Give me one thing I can believe in / that isn't a brand name.”
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“Whenever someone says the words 'Our friendship is more important than this,' watch out, because it almost never is.”
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“The more we seek exclusivity in friendship, the more it becomes obligatory and the less likely it is to fulfill the wonderful vision of what true friendship can be.”
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“Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job. It is also (though we rarely admit it) extremely exhausting.”
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“I haven't hurt you ... if I have, it's the faithful wound of a friend.”
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“There are people whom one loves immediately and for ever. Even to know they are alive in the world with one is quite enough.”
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“Nothing cements friendship like mutual admiration ...”
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“The depth of a friendship — how much it means to us ... depends, at least in part, upon how many parts of ourselves a friend sees, shares and validates.”
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“To sit together drinking the blue ocean / And eating the sun like a fruit.”
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“Lovers and even some family members may come and go but the friendships that take root abide. Sometimes the best of what is true survives as if it had an independent will: The coals of friendship keep themselves alive until something happens to rekindle them.”
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“It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship.”
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“In their friendship they were like two of a litter that can never play together without leaving traces of tooth and claw, wounding each other in the most sensitive places.”
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“... friendship, which is of its nature a delicate thing, fastidious, slow of growth, is easily checked, will hesitate, demur, recoil where love, good old blustering love, bowls ahead and blunders through every obstacle.”
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“Love is like the wild rose-briar; / Friendship like the holly-tree. / The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, / But which will bloom most constantly?”
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“... friendship is a virtue which comprehends all the rest; none being fit for this, who is not adorned with every other virtue.”
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“But, alas! Misfortunes are too apt to wear out Friendship ...”
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“I have a theory about why opposites attract. I think it's because we have a deep desire to get on each other's nerves.”
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“When I was young I thought of friendship as a matter of total loyalty and unchanging preference and I was often disappointed. But as an adult I had come to see that it was more the refraction of some total faithfulness and joy of which we all had some primordial notion. The exchange of trust and the experience of understanding between two people was like a sign or witness to the possibilitity of eternal caring and understanding and communication.”
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“I don't think life offers any greater experience than the joyful sense of recognition when one finds in a new acquaintance a real friend, or when an old relationship deepens into friendship, or when one finds an old friendship intact despite the passage of years and many absences.”
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“Friend! It is a common word, often lightly used. Like other good and beautiful things, it may be tarnished by careless handling.”
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“... I have no other hope of happiness than in being with you, dearest!”
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“I confess to you, dear Ottilie, that I do not like the idea of going to you with my health so broken as it is now. You are also an invalid. Must we lie on two sophas and look at each other? — tho' this would be better than nothing, and better than to be separated for more years, till life ebbs away and leaves our best hopes stranded like wrecks on the shore.”
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“You can't always be friendly. It's impossible, there isn't the time.”
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“The only rose without thorns is friendship.”
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“There had to be a sixth sense to deep friendship, and it was only in time of trouble that one had the opportunity to perceive the rarity of what was being offered.”
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“... one doesn't measure friendship by length of time only; depth of time is just as valuable.”
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“Friendship is not linear. It moves in all directions, teaching us about ourselves and about each other.”
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“But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”
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“I feel to love you more and more every day, and you will laugh, but I feel towards you much more like a lover than a female friend! What would I give to see you for an hour!”
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“Friendship has splendors that love knows not. It grows stronger when crossed, whereas obstacles kill love. Friendship resists time, which wearies and severs couples. It has heights unknown to love.”
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“Just as love is a decision, so is sisterhood. It is the result of many acts of love, large and small, performed for one another. Girls are brought together by circumstances, but it is love, laughter, forgiveness, shared joys and sorrows that make sisters.”
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“I believe that friendship, like love, of which it is a particular kind, requires nearly as much art as a successful choreography.”
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“Friendships, like geraniums, bloom in kitchens.”
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“How different everything is when you are with the right people!”
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“... and I have learned that to have a good friend is the purest of all God's gifts, for it is a love that has no exchange of payment. It is not inherited, as with a family. It is not compelling, as with a child And it has no means of physical pleasure, as with a mate. It is, therefore, an indescribable bond that brings with it a far deeper devotion than all the others.”
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“The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.”
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“Platonic friendship: — The interval between the introduction and the first kiss.”
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“In a world more and more polluted by the lying of politicians and the illusions of the media, I occasionally crave to hear and tell the truth. To borrow a beautiful phrase from Friedrich Nietzche, I look upon my friend as 'the beautiful enemy' who alone is able to offer me total candor. Friendship is by its very nature freer of deceit than any other relationship we can know because it is the bond least affected by striving for power, physical pleasure, or material profit, most liberated from any oath of duty or of constancy.”
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“The truth is that friendship is to me every bit as sacred and eternal as marriage.”
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“Friendship is an occupation. I can be a good friend or I can be a writer. I can't do both.”
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“Most people really don't expect marriages to last forever but they do expect their friendships will.”
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“... in the last analysis, friendship is what you say it is.”
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“The happiest business in all the world is that of making friends, / And no investment on the street pays larger dividends, / For life is more than stocks and bonds, and love than rate percent, / And he who gives in friendship's name shall reap what he has spent.”
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“Friendship was as much a matter of knowing when not to speak as when one should.”
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“... friendship is the bread of the heart.”
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“Illness is friendship's proving ground, the uncharted territory where one's actions may be the least sure-footed but also the most indelible.”
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“When friends ask for a second cup they are open to conversation ...”
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“I find too there are few Friendships in the World Marriage-Proof; especially when the Person our Friend marries has not a Soul particularly capable of the Tenderness of that Endearment ... we may generally conclude the Marriage of a Friend to be the Funeral of a Friendship ...”
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“The pleasures of intimacy in friendship depend far more on external circumstances than people of a sentimental turn of mind are willing to concede; and when constant companionship ceases to suit the convenience of both parties, the chances are that it will be dropped on the first favourable opportunity.”
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“The finest kind of friendship is between people who expect a great deal of each other but never ask it.”
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“Friendship is more important than truth.”
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“Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings and realize that it's sometimes more important to be nice than to be honest.”
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“Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses — pretty but designed to slow women down.”