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21 " London, December 1915. In the master bedroom (never was the estate agent's epithet more appropriate) of Flat 21, Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, the distinguished author is dying - slowly, but surely. In Flanders, less than two hundred miles away, other men are dying more quickly, more painfully, more pitifully - young men, mostly, with their lives still before them, blank pages that will never be filled. The author is seventy-two. He has had an interesting and varied life, written many books, travelled widely, enjoyed the arts, moved in society (one winter he dined out 107 times), and owns a charming old house in Rye as well as the lease of this spacious London flat with its fine view of the Thames. He has had deeply rewarding friendships with both men and women. If he has never experienced sexual intercourse, that was by his own choice, unlike the many young men in Flanders who died virgins either for lack of opportunity or because they hoped to marry and were keeping themselves chaste on principle. "
― David Lodge , Author, Author
22 " You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel. "
― Alexander McCall Smith , The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency #1)
23 " When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know. "
― Ralph Waldo Emerson , Essays, First Series
24 " They had battled and bloodied one another, they had kept secrets, broken hearts, lied, betrayed, exiled, they had walked away, said goodbye and sworn it was forever, and somehow, every time, they had mended, they had forgiven, they had survived. Some mistakes could never be fixed - some, but not all. Some people can't be driven away, no matter how hard you try. Some friendships won't break. "
― Robin Wasserman , Greed (Seven Deadly Sins, #7)
25 " Female friendships that work are relationships in which women help each other belong to themselves. "
26 " Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work but the solidest things we know. "
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
27 " Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. "
― C.S. Lewis
28 " There is a twilight zone in our hearts that we ourselves cannot see. Even when we know quite a lot about ourselves-our gifts and weaknesses, our ambitions and aspirations, our motives and our drives-large parts of ourselves remain in the shadow of consciousness. This is a very good thing. We will always remain partially hidden to ourselves. Other people, especially those who love us, can often see our twilight zones better than we ourselves can. The way we are seen and understood by others is different from the way we see and understand ourselves. We will never fully know the significance of our presence in the lives of our friends. That's a grace, a grace that calls us not only to humility, but to a deep trust in those who love us. It is the twilight zones of our hearts where true friendships are born. "
― Henri J.M. Nouwen
29 " Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back "
30 " The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses. "
― Darin Strauss
31 " But then I wondered if sometimes our friendships are a bit like clothes and when they start feeling uncomfortable it's not because we've done anything wrong. It just means that we've outgrown them. "
― Zoe Sugg
32 " As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another. "
― Jonathan Lethem , Men and Cartoons
33 " Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to " keep" by force of mere inertia. "
34 " Even when I'm alone I have real good company — dreams and imaginations and pretendings. I like to be alone now and then, just to think over things and taste them. But I love friendships — and nice, jolly little times with people. "
― L.M. Montgomery , Anne's House of Dreams (Anne of Green Gables, #5)
35 " Good female friendships are the strongest relationships in the world. "
36 " If we were all given by magic the power to read each other’s thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be almost all friendships would be dissolved; the second effect, however, might be excellent, for a world without any friends would be felt to be intolerable, and we should learn to like each other without needing a veil of illusion to conceal from ourselves that we did not think each other absolutely perfect. "
― Bertrand Russell , The Conquest of Happiness
37 " Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possesed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimspes, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all. "
― C.S. Lewis , The Problem of Pain
38 " (T)here exist friendships which develop their own inner duration, their own eons of transparent time. "
― Vladimir Nabokov
39 " As I look back over the other best friendships I've had that also ended, I wonder if, in addition to simply having a finite amount of time for such intimacy, we also have certain periods in our lives in which we seek out people who seem to embody the things we lack. Then, when we gain those things for ourselves, we no longer need that friend in the same way, which causes a serious dissonance in the relationship. Perhaps this is why these particular friendships burn so bright and then disappear so completely. "
― Jennifer O'Connell , Everything I Needed to Know about Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume
40 " Just having friends isn’t enough, however. Our friendships should be ones that are pleasing to God and edifying to us as well as our friends. "
― Amy E. Spiegel , Letting Go of Perfect: Women, Expectations, and Authenticity