Tag: quotation

Friendship intimacy calls for whoever is on the receiving end of the information to offer “hefty helpings of emotional expressiveness and unconditional support.” Yet, as Karbo points out, they can’t be too opinionated. So if I’m enraged that Matt canceled our Friday night plans, again, she better huff and puff and agree it was lame of him, but she would never say “He’s such an ass, I’ve never liked him.” Such are the unwritten rules of friendship.

Rachel Bertsche, MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search For A New Best Friend

At a certain age our parents offhandedly start telling us things we’ve never heard before, about themselves and their families, their upbringing and history. They’re turning their lives into stories, trying to make sense of them in retrospect and pass them on while there’s still time. You begin, embarrassingly belatedly, to see them as people with lives long preceding your own.

Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

He’d become so accustomed to keeping those sorts of thoughts to himself that he no longer seemed capable of sharing them at all.

Jennifer Smith, This is What Happy Looks Like

It was funny, what friendship meant in Rebecca’s world. It mainly meant lunch, twice a year, and the occasional dinner party, except for Dorothea, who was an old school friend, a genuine friend. Rebecca had realized, ruefully, that she should have made more friends in school; they seemed to be the only ones women really talked to honestly because the shared history meant fewer lies were available to them. With the others shared meals had become a substitute for intimacy, but not the kind of substitute that allowed for dark nights of the soul, calls at 1:00 A.M., tears and drinking and despair in pajamas.

Anna Quindlen, Still Life with Bread Crumbs

It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.

Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”

We cherished what we had together, though we never put into words how very precious it was. Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons —something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn’t going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear.

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods–the long-distance phone call, the telegram–were marked “For Emergency Use Only.” So my parents waved me off into the unknown, and their news bulletins about me would have been restricted to “Yes, he’s arrived safely,"and "Last time we heard he was in Oregon,” and “We expect him back in a few weeks.” I’m not saying this was necessarily better, let alone more character-forming; just that in my case it probably helped not to have my parents a button’s touch away, spilling out anxieties and long-range weather forecasts, warning me against floods, epidemics and psychos who preyed on backpackers.

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Once someone’s hurt you, it’s harder to relax around them, harder to think of them as safe to love. But it doesn’t stop you from wanting them.

Holly Black, White Cat

The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear.

Stephen King, Different Seasons