friendship Quotes

“A day without a friend is like a pot without a single drop of honey left inside.”

“Books! And cleverness! There are more important things! — Friendship! And Bravery!”

“Nobody’s ever asked me to a party before, as a friend!”

“I mean, it’s sort of exciting isn’t it? Breaking the rules.”

“To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.”

“Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy ready-made things in the shops. But since there are no shops where you can buy friends, men no longer have any friends.”

“But from that moment on, Hermione Granger became their friend. Because there are somethings you can’t go through in life and become friends, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.”

“Sometimes friendship means not having to say anything. Thank yous and apologies can sometimes get lost, but that doesn’t mean they’re unexpressed,”

“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.”

“You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing.”

“By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”

“Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart.”

“No one had ever had such a friend—so affectionate, so loyal, and so skillful.”

“The quickest way to spoil a friendship is to wake somebody up in the morning before he is ready.”

“I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is!”

“Anyone who gives you a cinnamon roll fresh out of the oven is a friend for life.”

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

“When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction.”

“Now we’ll start this band of robbers and call it Tom Sawyer’s gang. Everybody that wants to join has got to take an oath, and write his name in blood.”

“What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”

“Jo’s eyes sparkled, for it’s always pleasant to be believed in, and a friend’s praise is always sweeter than a dozen newspaper puffs.”

“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.”

“There is nothing so bad as parting with one’s friends. One seems too forlorn without them.”

“I might have known,” said Eeyore. “After all, one can’t complain. I have my friends. Somebody spoke to me only yesterday. And was it last week or the week before that Rabbit bumped into me and said ‘Bother!’. The Social Round. Always something going on.”

“It’s your fault, Eeyore. You’ve never been to see any of us. You just stay here in this one corner of the Forest waiting for the others to come to you. Why don’t you go to THEM sometimes?”

“No Give and Take. No Exchange of Thought. It gets you nowhere, particularly if the other person’s tail is only just in sight for the second half of the conversation.”

“If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”

“New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.”

“The Soul selects her own Society.”

“Just always be waiting for me.”

“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”

“Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?”

“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.”

“Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses... swapped back and forth and over again.”

“I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum.”

“Patrick and Sam didn’t just throw around inside jokes and make me struggle to keep up. Not at all. They asked me questions.”

“Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down.”

“Sam sat down and started laughing. Patrick started laughing. I started laughing. And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”

“Then, he started crying. Then, he started talking about Brad. And I just let him. Because that’s what friends are for.”

“It would be very nice to have a friend again. I would like that even more than a date.”

“Sam and Patrick looked at me. And I looked at them. And I think they knew. Not anything specific really. They just knew. And I think that’s all you can ever ask from a friend.”

“I just couldn’t watch them hurt Patrick even if things weren’t clear just yet.”

“I wished I could have made her feel better, but sometimes, I guess you just can’t.”

“I just kind of listen and nod because Patrick needs to talk.”

“I don’t know how much longer I can keep going without a friend. I used to be able to do it very easily, but that was before I knew what having a friend was like.”

“I do consider you a friend, Charlie.”

“I just remember walking between them and feeling for the first time that I belonged somewhere.”

“I want friends, not admirers. People who respect me for my character and my deeds, not my flattering smile. The circle around me would be much smaller, but what does that matter, as long as they’re sincere?”

“Mother has said that she sees us more as friends than as daughters. That’s all very nice, of course, except that a friend can’t take the place of a mother. I need my mother to set a good example and be a person I can respect, but in most matters, she’s an example of what not to do.”

″‘If ever you are passing my way,’ said Bilbo, ‘don’t wait to knock! Tea is at four; but any of you are welcome at any time!‘”

“...Who could refrain, That had a heart to love, and in that heart Courage to make love known?”

“I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain.”

“How much that strange confession explained to him! The painter’s absurd fits of jealousy, his wild devotion, his extravagant panegyrics, his curious reticences -- he understood them all now, and he felt sorry. There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.”

“They were simply four people who liked being there together.”

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

“They fought each other until 1933, when they were seventeen. Grudging respect turned to genuine friendship, and the urge to fight left them.”

“It cannot have escaped your notice that for some time past the friendship I have had in my heart for you has ripened into a deeper feeling, a feeling more beautiful, more pure, more sacred. Dare I name it you? Ah! It is love which makes me so bold!”

“Ya need some girlfriends, hon, ’cause they’re furever. Without a vow. A clutch of women’s the most tender, most tough place on Earth.”

“That’s what sisters and girlfriends are all about. Sticking together even in the mud, ’specially in mud.”

“The man’s cub—the man’s cub? I speak for the man’s cub. There is no harm in a man’s cub. I have no gift of words, but I speak the truth. Let him run with the Pack, and be entered with the others. I myself will teach him.”

“I said it would be better if we weren’t friends, not that I didn’t want to be.”

I know a way to stay friends forever, There’s really nothing to it, I tell you what to do, And you do it.

How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live ’em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give ’em.

Sometimes you simply needed someone kind to sit with you while you dealt with things.

“That was the thing about best friends. Like sisters and mothers, they could piss you off and make you cry and break your heart, but in the end, when the chips were down, they were there, making you laugh even in your darkest hours. ”

“To make real friends you have to put yourself out there. Sometimes people will let you down, but you can’t let that stop you. If you get hurt, you just pick yourself up, dust off your feelings, and try again.”

“That was what a best friend did: hold up a mirror and show you your heart.”

“Sometimes being a good friend means saying nothing.”

“This is the problem with forever friends. They know too much.”

“I guess no one stays friends for more than thirty years without broken hearts along the way.”

“It was true; always had been. Friendships were like marriages in that way. Routines and patterns were poured early and hardened like cement.”

“Their friendship was more important than any relationship. Guys would come and go; girlfriends were forever.”

“It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.”

“I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why.”

“George can tell you screwy things, and it don’t matter. It’s just the talking. . . . That’s all.”

“When his Aunt Clara died, Lennie just come along with me out workin’. Got kinda used to each other after a little while.”

″‘I said what stake you got in this guy? You takin’ his pay away from him?′ ‘No, ‘course I ain’t. Why you think I’m sellin’ him out?′ ‘Well, I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another guy. I just like to know what your interest is.‘”

“But you get used to goin’ around with a guy an’ you can’t get rid of him.”

“And it’d be our own, an’ nobody could can us. . . . An’ if a fren’ come along, why we’d have an extra bunk, an’ we’d say, ‘Why don’t you spen’ the night?′ An’ . . . he would.”

“Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”

“O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.”

“I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.”

“Christmas Day is in our grasp So long as we have hands to grasp.”

“Christmas Day will always be Just as long as we have we.”

“You were worth it, old friend, and a thousand times over.”

“They’ll soon take you away, and I shall lose the only friend I have, and most likely we shall never see each other again. ‘Tis a hard world!”

We will die together, friend Ned.

“I don’t want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.”

″‘You’ve said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing,’ he was saying; ‘but you know that friendship’s not what I want: that there’s only one happiness in life for me, that word that you dislike so ... yes, love!...‘”

“In spite of your heart, I think; alas, poor heart! If you spite it for my sake, I will spite it for yours; for I will never love that which my friend hates.”

“To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason?”

“God of the golden wand, why have you come? A beloved, honored friend, but it’s been so long, your visits much too rare. Tell me what’s on your mind. I’m eager to do it, whatever I can do . . . whatever can be done.”

“She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness with someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read.”

The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.

It is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.

“Nobody -- that’s my name. Nobody -- so my mother and father call me, all my friends.”

“The happiest of all things is when an old friend comes and greets us as in former times; the heart is comforted with the assurance that some day everything that we have loved will be given back”

“I thought they’d be happy for me. They’re supposed to be my friends.”

I believe, Messieurs, in loyalty---to one’s friends and one’s family and one’s caste.

“Sathsariakal, Madela. Good news!”

“Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace!”

“But I really believe, and Daddy really believes, that there are more good people on this earth than bad people, and the good people watch out for each other and take care of each other.”

“The best way to measure how much you’ve grown isn’t by inches or the number of laps you can now run around the track, or even your grade point average — though those things are important, to be sure. It’s what you’ve done with your time, how you’ve chosen to spend your days, and whom you’ve touched this year. That, to me, is the greatest measure of success.”

“I wish every day could be Halloween. We could all wear masks all the time. Then we could walk around and get to know each other before we got to see what we looked like under the masks.”

“Courage. Kindness. Friendship. Character. These are the qualities that define us as human beings, and propel us, on occasion, to greatness.”

“It’s not enough to be friendly. You have to be a friend.”

“No one has time any more for anyone else.”

“They’ll stand close together, with Christmas bells ringing. They’ll stand hand-in-hand, and those Whos will start singing!”

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at least one which makes the heart run over.”

“I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it?”

“How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live ‘em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give ‘em.”

“They used to be buddies, I thought, they used to be friends, and now they hate each other because one has to work for a living and the other comes from the West Side.”

“If I had an ear 2 confide in I would cry among my treasured friends But who do u know that stops that long to help another carry on The world moves fast and it would rather pass u by than 2 stop and c what makes u cry”

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”

″‘Up to now,’ Miss Honey went on, ‘I have found it impossible to talk to anyone about my problems. I couldn’t face the embarrassment, and anyway I lack the courage. Any courage I had was knocked out of me when I was young. But now, all of a sudden I have a sort of desperate wish to tell everything to somebody. I know you are only a tiny little girl, but there is some kind of magic in you somewhere. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.‘”

It was not perhaps the warmest friendship in the world, they would not send each other Christmas gift greetings, but they would not murder each other.

“I think about the sheer number of people who pulled together and I can barely comprehend it. My crewmates sacrificed a year of their lives to come back for me.”

Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than the government. It is almost the equal of family.

A friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults.

“Sometimes Matilda longed for a friend, someone like the kind, courageous people in her books.”

“I have no love for a friend who loves in words alone.”

“I think we ought to do all we can to make these creatures friendly. It might turn out to be well worth the trouble.”

″‘I saw the way you shoved him into the ditch. You could have really hurt him. Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?’ the boy replied calmly, not the least intimidated by Bernard.”

“This is really all I ever hoped for—to be someplace amazing with my best friends.”

“With Nick, however, Colin had the freedom to be his true self. Nick, who had known him since childhood, was probably the only person on the planet who didn’t give a damn about his money, and more important, the only one who was there during what they both referred to as ‘the war years.’ For beneath the wide grin and the charismatic personality, Colin struggled with a severe anxiety disorder and crippling depression, and Nick was one of the few people allowed to witness this side of him.”

“He lived in friendship beside Vasudeva, and sometimes they would exchange words with each other, few and well-considered words. Vasudeva was no friend of words, Siddhartha seldom succeeded in inducing him to speak.”

“You are my best friend as well as my lover, and I do not know which side of you I enjoy the most. I treasure each side, just as I have treasured our life together.”

Keep your friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent.

″It is said that we can’t attain enlightenment, let alone feel contentment and joy, without seeing who we are and what we do, without seeing our patterns and our habits. This is called maitri - developing loving-kindness and an unconditional friendship with ourselves.″

“I have found that the platonic affection in friendships and familial love for children can be relied upon with certainty to lift the bruised soul and repair the wounded spirit.”

“Ani tried to respond with friendly attentiveness. Ani felt as dumb at conversation as she had over Gilsa’s cooking pot that day she prepared the lunch, the contents turning blacker and smelling fouler despite her anxious attempts. She had no practice at making friends. And, she discovered, her own trust had been drained dry.”

“Thomas rocked back on his heels, then ran his arm across his forehead, wiping away the sweat. And at that moment, in the space of only a few seconds, he learned a lot about himself. About the Thomas that was before. He couldn’t leave a friend to die”

“My mom didn’t understand why it was so awful that “that cute little girl” had held my hand. She thought I should make friends with her. “I thought you liked soccer, honey. Why don’t you go out there and kick the ball around?” Because I didn’t want to be kicked around, that’s why. And although I couldn’t say it like that at the time, I still had enough sense at age seven and a half to know that Juli Baker was dangerous.”

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

“Love opens the door of ancient recognition. You enter. You come home to each other at last. As Euripides said, ‘Two friends, one soul.‘”

“A good deed, “said the prophet Mohammed, ‘is one that brings a smile of joy to the face of another.’ Why will doing a good deed every day produce such astounding efforts on the doer? Because trying to please others will cause us to stop thinking of ourselves: the very thing that produces worry and fear and melancholia.”

“And Isi always listened, never told Enna she had been foolish, never said hollow things like ‘You’ll be all right.’ . . . Isi saw Enna’s struggle and her sadness, and she understood.”

“He’s just Finn. We’ve been friends too long and I know him too well, you know? And he’s still a boy, Doda. If I ever find a man, he’ll have to be a man, really a man, to handle me”

“Let’s never try to get even with our enemies, because if we do we will hurt ourselves far more than we hurt them. Let’s do as General Eisenhower does: let’s never waste a minute thinking about people we don’t like.”

‘‘‘I know,’ he said, breaking our embrace. ‘Inshallah, we’ll celebrate later. Right now, I’m going to run that blue kite for you,’ he said. He dropped the spool and took off running, the hem of his green chapan dragging in the snow behind him. ‘Hassan!’ I called. ‘Come back with it!’ He was already turning the street corner, his rubber boots kicking up snow. He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘For you a thousand times over!’ he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner. The next time I saw him smile unabashedly like that was twenty-six years later, in a faded Polaroid photograph.”

“Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition.”

“A friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.”

“But I have had your friendship—grace to you A woman’s charm has passed across my path.”

“Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.”

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep… But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”

“The Pants were the only witness to all our lives. They were the witness and the document too.”

“The five of us walking confidently in a row, I’d never felt cooler. The Great Perhaps was upon us, and we were invincible. The plan may have had faults, but we did not.”

“They gave her courage. The Pants mysteriously held the attributes of her three best friends, and luckily bravery was one of them. She would give the Pants what meager gifts she had, but courage was the thing she would take.”

“There was a clearing directly in front of her, at the center of which an enormous tree thrust up, its thick roots rumpling the ground ten feet around in every direction. Sitting relaxed with his back against the trunk was a boy, almost a man. And he seemed so glorious to Winnie that she lost her heart at once.”

“Sometimes it seems like we’re so close we form one single complete person rather than four separate ones.”

″...there were a million little lines of shading that we couldn’t convey so easily. They were the subtle things, and understanding them, even knowing when you missed them, was what separated other friends from real friends, like we were.”

“Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.”

“Within Easy Company they had made the best friends they had ever had, or would ever have. They were prepared to die for each other; more important, they were prepared to kill for each other.”

“I didn’t know whether to trust Alaska, and I’d certainly had enough of her unpredictability—cold one day, sweet the next; irresistibly flirty one moment, resistibly obnoxious the next. I preferred the Colonel: At least when he was cranky, he had a reason.”

“Tonight was different. I felt like we were each separate and full to our edges with our own stories, mostly unshared. In a way it scared me, having a summer of experiences and feelings that belonged to me alone.”

“Love your pals. Love yourself.”

“Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.”

“She did not allow herself to consider the idea that making a difference in the world might require a bolder venture. She merely told herself consolingly, “Of course, while I’m in the wood, if I decide never to come back, well then, that will be that.” She was able to believe in this because she needed to; and, believing, was her own true, promising friend once more.”

“I thought of Florida, of my “school friends,” and realized for the first time how much I would miss the Creek if I ever had to leave it. I stared down at Takumi’s twig sticking out of the mud and said, “I swear to God I won’t rat.”

“Money is the tool, my child, not the mason; it can help you make acquaintances but not true friends; and it might buy you a life of leisure but not a life of peace.”

“I asked, “Do you think you should help him?” “Yes,” he said, “I thought we were going to.” “How?” I asked. “By taking him fishing with us.” “I’ve just told you,” I said, “he doesn’t like to fish.” “Maybe so,” my brother replied. “But maybe what he likes is somebody trying to help him.”

“Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn’t seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.”

“Tonight we give the Pants the love of our Sisterhood so we can take that love wherever we go.”

“I don’t know,” said Winnie, “but it doesn’t matter. Tell your father I want to help. I have to help. If it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t have been any trouble in the first place. Tell him I have to.”

“But we will deal with those bastards, Pudge. I promise you. They will regret messing with one of my friends.”

“Your rote memorization is, like, so impressive,” I said. “You guys are like an old married couple.” Alaska smiled. “In a creepy way.”

“Still the Pants promised us there was time. Nothing would be lost. There was all year if we needed it. We had all the way until next summer, when we would take out the Traveling Pants and, together or apart, begin again.”

“Believe me, Winnie Foster,” said Jesse, “it would be terrible for you if you drank any of this water. Just terrible. I can’t let you.”

“And if the Colonel thought that calling me his friend would make me stand by him, well, he was right.”

“But we knew what could be found out, and in finding it out, she had made us closer—the Colonel and Takumi and me, anyway.”

“So we gave up. I’d finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We’d failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved.”

“One by one, as the rain began, they drew her to them and kissed her. One by one she kissed them back. Was it rain on Mae’s face? On Tuck’s? Or was it tears? Jesse was last. He put his arms around her and hugged her tight, and whispered the single word, “Remember!”

“They had tried to bring her up properly, with a true sense of right and wrong. They did not understand. And finally she had sobbed the only truth there was into her mother’s shoulder, the only explanation: the Tucks were her friends. She had done it because—in spite of everything, she loved them.”

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”

“She had gone away with the Tucks because—well, she just wanted to. The Tucks had been very kind to her, had given her flapjacks, taken her fishing. The Tucks were good and gentle people.”

“It was the same with our friends,” said Mae. “They come to pull back from us. There was talk about witchcraft. Black magic. Well, you can’t hardly blame them, but finally we had to leave the farm. We didn’t know where to go.”

“So,” said Tuck to himself. “Two years. She’s been gone two years.” He stood up and looked around, embarrassed, trying to clear the lump from his throat. But there was no one to see him. […] Tuck wiped his eyes hastily. Then he straightened his jacket again and drew up his hand in a brief salute. “Good girl,” he said aloud.”

“I wonder if [Margo] created this journey for us on purpose or by accident—regardless, it’s the most fun I’ve had since the last time I spent hours behind the wheel of a minivan.”

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

“You don’t like anything. You are the most depressed person I’ve ever met, and excuse me for saying this, but you are no fun to be around and I think you need professional help.”

“I know friends should be supportive of each other’s life decisions and all that.”

“We fall into clans: Jocks, Country Clubbers, Idiot Savants, Cheerleaders, Human Waste, Eurotrash, Future Fascists of America, Big Hair Chix, the Marthas, Suffering Artists, Thespians, Goths, Shredders. I am clanless.”

“They swallow her whole and she never looks back at me. Not once.”

“I see a few friends - people I used to think were my friends - but they look away.”

“I don’t want to be cool. I want to grab her by the neck and shake her and scream at her to stop treating me like dirt. She didn’t even bother to find out the truth – what kind of friend is that?”

″‘We have a club,’ Pigeon said, receiving a glare from Summer. ‘What sort of club?’ Mrs. White asked. Pigeon looked to Summer. ‘We explore stuff,’ Summer said. ‘And ride bikes,’ Nate added.”

“What about Jacob? What was I going to do about him? My former best friend who was now...what? My enemy?”

“It had been good being around the living again instead of moping around with the ghosts of her past.”

″‘It’s so unfair,’ said Bruno. ‘I don’t see why I have to be stuck over here on this side of the fence where there’s no one to talk to and no one to play with and you get to have dozens of friends and are probably playing for hours every day. I’ll have to speak to Father about it.‘”

″‘Nate, why don’t you go outside for a while? I saw some kids playing out there.’ ‘But I don’t know them.’ ‘Then go get acquainted. When I was your age, I was friends with whoever happened to be out roaming the neighborhood.’ ‘Sounds like a good way to get stabbed by a hobo,’ Nate grumbled. ‘You know what I mean.‘”

“And then the room went very dark and somehow, despite the chaos that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel’s hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.”

“He felt that he should say it one last time and really mean it. ‘I’m very sorry, Shmuel,’ he said in a clear voice. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t tell him the truth. I’ve never let a friend down like that before. Shmuel, I’m ashamed of myself.‘”

“He took hold of Shmuel’s tiny hand in his and squeezed it tightly. ‘You’re my best friend, Shmuel,’ he said. ‘My best friend.‘”

“Having a lover/friend who regards you as a living growing criatura, being, just as much as the tree from the ground, or a ficus in the house, or a rose garden out in the side yard... having a lover and friends who look at you as a true living breathing entity, one that is human but made of very fine and moist and magical things as well... a lover and friends who support the ciatura in you... these are the people you are looking for. They will be the friends of your soul for life. Mindful choosing of friends and lovers, not to mention teachers, is critical to remaining conscious, remaining intuitive, remaining in charge of the fiery light that sees and knows.”

What was I doing up here anyway? Why did I let Finny talk me into stupid things like this? Was he getting some kind of hold over me?

″‘What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.’ I didn’t think that this was true, […] but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny’s: it should have been true. So I didn’t argue.”

“I will love you with no regard to the actions of our enemies or the jealousies of actors. I will love you with no regard to the outrage of certain parents or the boredom of certain friends. I will love you no matter what is served in the world’s cafeterias or what game is played at each and every recess.”

“I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat, and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms.”

“I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.”

“I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday.”

“But I must admit I miss you terribly. The world is too quiet without you nearby.”

“I will love you until every fire is extinguished and rebuilt from the handsomest and most susceptible of woods. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close... I will love you until your face is fogged by distant memory.”

″ I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp... I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and all the secrets have gone gasping into the world.”

“Life never end when you are in it.”

“The funny thing was, I never really bought into Kim’s notion that they were somehow bound together through me - until just now when I saw her half carrying him down the hospital corridor.”

“For the first time in his life he got up every morning with something to look forward to. Leslie was more than his friend. She was his other, more exciting self – his way to Terabithia and all the worlds beyond.”

“Because that’s what you and I do. Protect each other.”

“I gotta tell yeh, I thought you two’d value yer friend more’n broomsticks or rats. That’s all.”

“All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.”

“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.”

″‘But I guess you’re different, aren’t you, Bud? I guess you sort of carry your family around inside of you, huh?’ ‘I guess I do. Inside my suitcase, too.‘”

“There in their secret place, his feelings bubbled inside him like a stew on the back of the stove--some sad for her in her lonesomeness, but chunks of happiness, too. To be able to be Leslie’s one whole friend in the world as she was his – he couldn’t help being satisfied about that.”

″‘She loved you, you know.’ He could tell from Bill’s voice that he was crying. ‘She told me once that if it weren’t for you…’ His voice broke completely. ‘Thank you,’ he said a moment later. ‘Thank you for being such a wonderful friend to her.‘”

“I said, ‘I’d trade you in a minute. The worst thing that’s going to happen to you is that they’re going to make you play house a lot … I tickled Jerry under his chin and said, “Ga-ga, goo-goo, baby-waby.’ Jerry couldn’t help but smile. I said, ‘You’re going to be great.’ Jerry looked like he wasn’t so scared anymore so I went over to my bed and started getting ready.”

″‘I am glad that you are here with me,’ said Frodo. ‘Here at the end of all things, Sam.‘”

“Of him also I learned how to receive favours and kindnesses (as commonly they are accounted:) from friends, so that I might not become obnoxious unto them, for them, nor more yielding upon occasion, than in right I ought; and yet so that I should not pass them neither, as an unsensible and unthankful man.”

″‘At last all such things must end,’ he said, ‘but I would have you wait a little while longer: for the end of the deeds that you have shared in has not yet come. A day draws near that I have looked for in all the years of my manhood, and when it comes I would have my friends beside me.‘”

“I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister – anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind. You influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me.”

“She was scraping at the mud on her bare legs. ‘I just wanted to find you, so you wouldn’t be so lonesome.’ She hung her head. ‘But I got too scared.‘”

“If she was proud of me, I was so proud of her that I carried my head high as I emerged from the dark cedars and shut the Cutters` gate softly behind me. Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she was, oh, she was still my Ántonia!”

“My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.”

“So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!”

“But I would help him as best I could. And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe plant a few ideas in his mind that would help both me and the people who would be his slaves in the years to come. I might even be making things easier for Alice.”

“My mother stopped the car and hugged him, and kissed him, and told him he was always welcome to come with us, anywhere we went; and I rather awkwardly put my arm around him, and we just sat that way in the car, until he had composed himself sufficiently for his return to 80 Front Street, where he marched in the back door, past Lydia’s room and the maids fussing in the kitchen, up the back stairs past the maids’ rooms, to my room and my bathroom, where he closed himself in and drew a deep bath. He handed me his sodden clothes, and I brought the clothes to the maids, who began their work on them.”

“The main thing is, Johnny,” Dan Needham said, “you have to show Owen that you love him enough to trust anything with him—to not care if you do or don’t get it back. It’s got to be something he knows you want back. That’s what makes it special.”

Dan understood that I loved Owen, and that I wanted to talk with him—most of all—but that it was a conversation, for both Owen’s sake and mine, that was best to delay. But before we finished loading the baseball cards in the car, Dan Needham asked me, “What are you giving him?” “What?” I said. “To show him that you love him,” Dan Needham said. “That’s what he was showing you. What have you got to give him?”

“It would be quite nice if you stopped jumping down out throats, Harry, because in case you haven’t noticed, Ron and I are on your side.”

“Maybe one day whites and blacks can be real friends, but right now the country ain’t built that way . . . The trouble is, down here in Mississippi, it costs too much to find out . . . So I think you’d better not try.”

“‘Of course it is,‘” answered Sam. ‘But not alone. I’m coming too, or neither of us isn’t going. I’ll knock holes in all the boats first.‘”

“Then justice is the art which gives good to friends and evil to enemies.”

“Or perhaps, to confess that you yourself are worried and frightened? You need your friends, Harry. As you so rightly said, Sirius would not have wanted you to shut yourself away.”

“And people will say: ‘Let’s hear about Frodo and the Ring!’ And they’ll say: ‘Yes, that’s one of my favorite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn’t he dad?’ ‘Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that’s saying a lot.‘”

″... he had stuck to his master all the way; that was what he had chiefly come for, and he would still stick to him. His master would not go to Mordor alone.”

“It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies—inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities—made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me; but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive. ”

“And you’re with me. And the journey’s finished. But after coming all that way I don’t want to give up yet. It’s not like me, somehow, if you understand.”

″‘The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself. One is to acquire a teacher. Do you remember the other?’ ‘Choose a friend.’ I said.”

“Hearing about him made me even miss practicing that stupid shot; and so I wrote to him, just casually—since when would a twenty-year-old actually come out and say he missed his best friend?”

“A warmth was spreading through him that had nothing to do with the sunlight; a tight obstruction in his chest seemed to be dissolving. He knew that Ron and Hermione were more shocked than they were letting on, but the mere fact that they were still there on either side of him, speaking bracing words of comfort, not shrinking from him as though he were contaminated or dangerous, was worth more than he could ever tell them.”

“Is there a lot of stuff you don’t understand? she said & I said pretty much the whole thing & she nodded & said that’s what she thought, but it was nice to hear it anyways and we sat there on the porch swing, listening to the wind & growing up together.”

“Friends gotta trust each other, Stacey, ‘cause ain’t nothin’ like a true friend.”

“They walked arm in arm, occupying the whole width of the street and taking in every Musketeer they met, so that in the end it became a triumphal march. The heart of D’Artagnan swam in delirium; he marched between Athos and Porthos, pressing them tenderly.”

“All for one, one for all.”

“Thank you most of all for friends. We appreciate the complicated and wonderful gifts you give us in each other.”

“Remember that I believe in you. I’m infinitely sorry for the foolish grievance I held against you yesterday afternoon.”

“You said you were but three, but it appears to me we are four.”

“In those days he really didn’t know what he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jail kid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in a jumbled way, that he had heard from “real intellectuals” - although, mind you, he wasn’t so naive as that in all other things, and it took him just a few months with Carlo Marx to become completely in there with all the terms and jargon. Nonetheless we understood each other on other levels of madness, and I agreed that he could stay at my house till he found a job and furthermore we agreed to go out West sometime. That was the winter of 1947.”

“This time we aren’t fighting the Yankees, we’re fighting our friends. But remember this, no matter how bitter things get, they’re still our friends and this is still our home.”