“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.”
“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.”
″ better not to have had thee than thus to want thee:
thou, having made me businesses which none
without thee can sufficiently manage, must either stay to execute
them thyself or take away with thee the very
services thou hast done; which if I have not enough
considered, as too much I cannot, to be more
thankful to thee shall be my study, and my profit
therein the heaping friendships.”
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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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!”
″...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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“My remembery called up the feel of being locked in the stocks, of my face being burnt, of him watching me from across the courtyard; him watching out for me. ‘Twas Curzon who made sure I survived. ‘Twas he who had been my steadfast friend since the day they brought me here.”
“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 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 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.”
“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 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.”
“They spent many hours together, wonderful hours of endless talk, so free and full that it combed the universe and bound the two of them together in bonds of closest friendship.”
″‘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.”
“How different things might be if, rather than saying “I think I’m in love,” we were saying “I’ve connected with someone in a way that makes me think I’m on the way to knowing love.”
″‘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.‘”
“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.‘”
“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.”
“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.”
“It was a friendship founded on many common tastes and interests, on mutual like and admiration of each for what the other was, and an attitude of respect which allowed unhampered expression of opinion even on those rare subjects which aroused differences of views and of belief. It was, therefore, the kind of friendship that can exist only between two men.”
“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.”
″‘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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
″‘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.‘”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.‘”
“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.”
“We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.”
“I remembered something my friend Jo likes to say whenever any of her friends are criticizing themselves. ‘Hey. That’s my best friend you’re talking about like that.‘”
“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.”
“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.”
″‘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.‘”
“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!”
“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.”
“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.‘”
“She then handed Hugo a photo she had taken of him with his old friends Antoine and Louis. They all had their arms around one another’s necks and were laughing.”
“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.”
“It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.”
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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Tess,” I say. “I’m going to head down to the water.I’ll be back in a minute.”
“You sure you can make it by yourself?” she asks.
“I’ll be fine.” I smile. “If you see me floating unconscious out to sea, though-by all means, come and get me.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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. ”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“We do not believe that we ‘grow’ our lives - we believe that we ‘make’ them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.”
“And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity. Mostly, he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty. ”
“We were so used to traveling we had to walk all over Long Island, but there was no more land, just the Atlantic Ocean, and we could only go so far. We clasped hands and agreed to be friends forever.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Those early months at the Cottages had been a strange time in our friendship. We were quarrelling over all kinds of little things, but at the same time we were confiding in each other more than ever.”
“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.”
“Our conversations were now stilted and reserved, as if [Aech and I] were both afraid of revealing some key piece of information the other might be able to use.”
“Joy is what God gives, not what we work up. Laughter is the delight that things are working together for good to those who love God, not the giggles that betray the nervousness of a precarious defense system.”
“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.”
“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.”
“They ought to be dangerous to their enemies, and gentle to their friends; if not, they will destroy themselves without waiting for their enemies to destroy them.”
″‘What a curious helmet you’ve got!’ she said cheerfully. ‘Is that your invention too?’
The Knight looked down proudly at his helmet, which hung from the saddle. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I’ve invented a better one than that – like a sugar loaf. When I used to wear it, if I fell off the horse, it always touched the ground directly. So I had a very little way to fall, you see – But there was the danger of falling into it, to be sure. That happened to me once – and the worst of it was, before I could get out again, the other White Knight came and put it on. He thought it was his own helmet.‘”
“Both men, once as close as men of that sort could be, stare at each other. One of them a man who refuses to forget the past, and one who can’t remember it at all.”
“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”
“So there they go, Jim running slower to stay with Will, Will running faster to stay with Jim, Jim breaking two windows in a haunted house because Will’s along, Will breaking one window instead of none, because Jim’s watching. God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shape we can make of the other.”
″‘Lord King, slay me speedily as a great traitor: for by my silence I have destroyed your son.’ And [Drinian] told [Caspian] the story. Then Caspian caught up a battle-axe and rushed upon the Lord Drinian to kill him, and Drinian stood still as a stock for the death blow. But when the axe was raised, Caspian suddenly threw it away and cried out, ‘I have lost my queen and my son: shall I lose my friend also?’ And he fell upon the Lord Drinian’s neck and embraced him and both wept, and their friendship was not broken.”
“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.”
“So now Jim was the kite, the wild twine cut, and whatever wisdom was his taking him away from Will who could only run, earthbound, after one so high and dark silent and suddenly strange.”
″‘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.‘”
“During this act of friendship, the two young men exchanged looks of intelligence, which caused Duncan to forget the character and condition of his wild associate.”
“But when Scrubb shook hands with Jill, he said, ‘So long, Jill. Sorry I’ve been a funk and so ratty. I hope you get safe home,’ and Jill said, ‘So long, Eustace. And I’m sorry I’ve been such a pig.’ And this was the first time they had ever used Christian names, because one didn’t do it at school.”
“And there, on the golden gravel of the bed of the stream, lay King Caspian, dead, with the water flowing over him like liquid glass […] And all three stood and wept. Even the Lion wept: great Lion-tears, each tear more precious than the Earth would be if it was a single solid diamond. And Jill noticed that Eustace looked neither like a child crying, nor like a boy crying and wanting to hide it, but like a grown-up crying.”
“There was nothing else to be done. The three travelers scrambled to their feet and joined hands. One wanted the touch of a friend’s hand at a moment like that.”
“There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers.”
“Things that cause friendship are: doing kindnesses; doing them unasked; and not proclaiming the fact when they are done, which shows that they were done for our own sake and not for some other reason.”
“I know about that because Freak has been showing me how to read a whole book and for some reason it all makes sense, where before it was just a bunch of words I didn’t care about.”