Mary Anne Radmacher

"Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Appreciate your friends. Continue to learn. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is."

Mary Anne Radmacher

Stephen King

"I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friend."

Stephen King (Different Seasons)

Paulo Coelho

"Our true friends are those who are with us when the good things happen. They cheer us on and are pleased by our triumphs. False friends only appear at difficult times, with their sad, supportive faces, when, in fact, our suffering is serving to console them for their miserable lives."

Paulo Coelho (The Zahir)

Mark Twain

"The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for."

Mark Twain

Dean Koontz

"Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life--and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next."

Dean Koontz (Fear Nothing)

Anaïs Nin

"Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key!'"

Anaïs Nin

Jon Katz

"I think if I've learned anything about friendship, it's to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don't walk away, don't be distracted, don't be too busy or tired, don't take them for granted. Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together ... "

Jon Katz

Robin Jones Gunn

"I look back now and realize that the gift of a true friend is that they see you not the way you see yourself or the way others see you. A true friend sees you for who you are and who you can become."

Robin Jones Gunn

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

"It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments."

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Sarah Dessen

"What is family other than the people who have claimed you? In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they are the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. Friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers, none perfect, but you shouldn't expect them to be. You can't make any one person your world. The trick is to... take what each can give you and build your world from it."

Sarah Dessen

Jon Katz

"I think if I've learned anything about friendship, it's to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don't walk away, don't be distracted, don't be too busy or tired, don't take them for granted. Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together. Powerful stuff. "

Jon Katz

Stephen King

"I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friend."

Stephen King

Scott Dunlop

Its standard police procedure (I’m assuming it is- I’m an expert on it having watched police programs from Kojak to Dexter), to ask the surviving relatives if the stiff, or the vic, had any enemies, so that they can ID the perp.

This is a useful debriefing procedure when you are interrogating yourself in the wee hours. One of you sits hunched in a chair, hollow-eyed and jonesin’ for a coffee or a smoke, while the other circles you. No good cop, bad cop, but rather just a mean lying rat-assed bastard of an inquisitor, second guessing everything you thought was true, but now have lost your bearings with. The lack of sleep and the constant revisiting of scenes of crimes, real and imagined warp the timelines and coordinates of reality. Soon you are adding to your mild wrongdoings a list of heinous activities that is almost genocidal in its documented form. The endless questioning has you longing for the stark comfort of your cell, where the fears and memories are contained and almost disarmed.

So what you need to do is ask what or who your enemies are. For some it maybe the guy at work who shamelessly takes credit for your labours but belittles you in meetings. It could be a family member with whom you refuse to share space at family events. Could be an actual enemy, who has genuinely threatened you. But don’t forget to add yourself to the list of suspects. Yup. Who knows better about how to mess with your head than you? Who can flick your buttons and twist your screws? Who knows that the worst kind of enemy is one from whom you cannot hide?

It’s not a death sentence. You can separate the fictions from the realities, and parse the evil from the good. The best defense against an inner enemy is an inner ally. It helps to surround yourself with people who will tell you the truth, and provide reinforcements of encouragement and love. Thank you for doing that.

Scott Dunlop

Peter Cameron

"What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that's what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know...I felt that by walking away I was abandoning [them], that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people."

Peter Cameron

George Eliot

"A friend is one to whom one may pour out all the contents of their heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away".

Elizabeth Gilbert

"So tonight I reach for my journal again. This is the first time I’ve done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I’m scared they will never leave. I say that I don’t want to take the drugs anymore, but I’m frightened I will have to. I am terrified that I will never really pull my life together.In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. This is what I find myself writing on the page:

I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and Braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.

Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship—the lending of a hand from
me to myself when nobody else is around to offer solace—reminds me of something that happened to me once in New York City. I walked into an office building one afternoon in a hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glance of myself in a security mirror’s reflection. In that moment, my brain did an odd thing—it fired off this split-second message: “Hey! You know her! That’s a friend of yours!” And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar. In a flash instant of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost doglike confusion over how a mirror works. But for some reason that incident comes to mind again tonight during my sadness in Rome, and I find myself writing this comforting reminder at the bottom of the page.

Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend …

I fell asleep holding my notebook pressed against my chest, open to this most recent assurance. In the morning when I wake up, I can still smell a faint trace of depression’s lingering smoke, but he himself is nowhere to be seen. Somewhere during the night, he got up and left. And his buddy loneliness beat it, too."

Elizabeth Gilbert

Thomas Jefferson

"But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine."

Thomas Jefferson

Friendship

A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.

Elbert Hubbard

A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely.

Pam Brown

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A single rose can be my garden... a single friend, my world.

Leo Buscaglia

A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.

Arnold H. Glasow

An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.

Buddha

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.

George Washington

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.

Thomas Jefferson

Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.

Alice Duer Miller

Don't ever dare to take your college as a matter of course - because, like democracy and freedom, many people you'll never know have broken their hearts to get it for you.

Alice Duer Miller

Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.
Shirley MacLaine


Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.

Aristotle

Friendship is one mind in two bodies.

Mencius

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

C. S. Lewis

Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.

Dag Hammarskjold

Friendship... is not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything.

Muhammad Ali

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.

Katherine Mansfield

I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.

Plutarch

I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.

Thomas A. Edison

I value the friend who for me finds time on his calendar, but I cherish the friend who for me does not consult his calendar.

Robert Brault

If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.

George MacDonald

If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.

Alice Duer Miller

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.

Albert Schweitzer

It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not.

Mignon McLaughlin

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.

Epicurus

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.

John Leonard

It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.

Marlene Dietrich

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Marcel Proust

Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.

Oprah Winfrey

Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference.

Emil Ludwig

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends.

Samuel Pepys

Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.

Plautus

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

George Santayana

She is a friend of 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.

Toni Morrison

Silences make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts.

Margaret Lee Runbeck

Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them.

Francesco Guicciardini

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

William Blake

On Friendship

"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."

Jane Austen

"It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter."

Marlene Dietrich

"A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words."

Donna Roberts

"Life is an awful, ugly place to not have a best friend."

Sarah Dessen

"It takes much bravery to stand up to our enemies but we need as much bravery to stand up to our friends."

J.K. Rowling

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."

Henri J.M. Nouwen

"I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light."

Helen Keller

"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."

J.R.R. Tolkien

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."

Ralph Waldo Emerson