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“A friend is one who walks in when everyone else walks out.”
“Understand that happiness is not based on possessions, power, or prestige, but on relationships with people you love and respect.”
“Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world.”
“A best friend, in my opinion, is someone who you can be foolish in front of, you know, be yourself.”
“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can hope to find in our travels is an honest friend.” -Robert Louis Stevenson
” ‘You have been my friends,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.’” –E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web
“To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise.” –Samuel Johnson
“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.” –Aristotle
“The greatest happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved–loved for ourselves, or rather, in spite of ourselves.” –Victor Hugo
“Friends may change and friendships evolve, but they never truly end because they are not merely the destinations of a passing moment but the journeys of a lifetime.”
“A friend is a person who reaches for your hand and touches your soul.”
“Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget.”
“There are not many things in life so beautiful as true friendship, and not many things more uncommon.”
“I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don’t believe I deserved my friends.” –Walt Whitman
“The making of friends, who are real friends, is the best token we have of a man’s success in life.” –Edward Everett Hale
“I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When the are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.” –Emerson
“Nothing makes the earth seems so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and the longitudes.” –Thoreau
“It is the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.” –Marlene Dietrich
“My God, this is a hell of a job. I have no trouble with my enemies. I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends, my goddamn friends. They’re the ones that keep me walking the floor at night.” –Warren G. Harding
“A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.” –Bernard Meltzer
“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friends, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” –E. M. Forster
“Two persons cannot long be friends if they cannot forgive each other’s little failings.” –Jean de la Bruyere
“Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.” –Mohammed Ali
“The most beautiful discover true friends can make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.”
“People say true friends must always hold hands, but true friends don’t need to hold hands because they know the other hand will always be there.”
“Friendship is certainly the balm for the pangs of disappointed love.” –Jane Austen
“Meaning that if someone is really close with you, your getting upset or them getting upset is okay, and they don’t change because of it. It’s just part of the relationship. It happens. You deal with it.” –Sarah Dessen, Just Listen
“It struck her that she was very lucky in her life’s people.” –Kristin Cashore, Fire
Everyone at Kindling Words gave a favorite quotation, many of which resonated with me, so I thought I would share those. . . .
“‘Now’ is the operative word. . . . You don’t need endless time and perfect conditions. Do it now. Do it today. Do it for twenty minutes and watch your heart start beating.”–Barbara Sher
“The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.”–Abbie Hoffman
“One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.”–Katherine Anne Porter
“We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.”–Sigmund Freud
“We will rise to the occasion which is life.”–Virginia Euwer Wolff
“Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.”–proverb
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”–Anton Chekhov
“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”–E. L. Doctorow
“It’s not down on any map; true places never are.”–Herman Melville
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”–George Bernard Shaw
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”–Mary Oliver
“Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”–Edith Wharton
“Don’t ask yourself what the world regards; ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”–Howard Thurman
“I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.”–William Faulkner
“That’s a sure way to tell about somebody–the way they play, or don’t play, make-believe.”–Madeleine L’Engle
“Things needs not have happened to be true.”–Neil Gaiman
“Grown-ups always say they protect their children, but they’re really protecting themselves. Besides, you can’t protect children. They know everything.”–Maurice Sendak
(I gave the Yeats quote that I love: “I bring you with reverent hands / The books of my numberless dreams.”)
I’ve been gathering quotes and passages that I love, or identify with, or find thought-provoking, or funny since high school. Sharing one of them seems like a nice way to begin a week.
“I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.”
-Emerson
Alice Sebold wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times last summer that had a great sentiment I wrote down for my quote collection, and part of it says very much why I’m a big re-reader of books:
“It is comfort, company, a way to buffer oneself form the pain and isolation of the everyday. It is the peace I find by visiting my closest friends. I have given up thinking I’m deranged for discovering them between the covers of a book.”
Perhaps I would not necessarily call my books my closest friends, but I do certainly think of them as friends. They’re familiar and engrossing and give something to me every time I open them, regardless of whether it’s the first time or the twentieth. And some of them have been with me since my childhood. They have not only their own stories inside them, but pieces of my story, my memories.
And so, my favorite comfort books, the ones that are as welcoming and comforting as old friends, the ones that make me feel that all will be right in the world…
The Song of the Lioness quartet by Tamora Pierce
Beauty by Robin McKinley
Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins
Matilda by Roald Dahl
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
Persuasion by Jane Austen
