Friendship Through The Years Quotes

We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good ... It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation. ~ David Halberstam

He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton. He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the most popular married women of the 'younger set,' in which it was the recognized custom to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it. If he had probed to the bottom of his vanity (as he sometimes nearly did) he would have found there the wish that his wife should be as worldly-wise and eager to please as the married lady whose charms had held his fancy through two mildly agitated years; without, of course, any hint of the frailty which had so nearly marred that unhappy being's life, and had disarranged his own plans for a whole winter.

How this miracle of fire and ice was to be created, and to sustain itself in a harsh world, he had never taken the time to think out; but he was content to hold his view without analyzing it, since he knew it was that of all the carefully-brushed, white-waistcoated, buttonhole-flowered gentlemen who succeeded each other in the club box, exchanged friendly greetings with him, and turned their opera-glasses critically on the circle of ladies who were the product of the system. In matters intellectual and artistic Newland Archer felt himself distinctly the superior of these chosen specimens of old New York gentility; he had probably read more, thought more, and even seen a good deal more of the world, than a ~ Edith Wharton

Dear old Jane is a jewel," agreed Anne, "but," she added, leaning forward to bestow a tender pat on the plump, dimpled little hand hanging over her pillow, "there's nobody like my own Diana after all. Do you remember that evening we first met, Diana, and 'swore' eternal friendship in your garden? We've kept that 'oath,' I think…we've never had a quarrel nor even a coolness. I shall never forget the thrill that went over me the day you told me you loved me. I had had such a lonely, starved heart all through my childhood. I'm just beginning to realize how starved and lonely it really was. Nobody cared anything for me or wanted to be bothered with me. I should have been miserable if it hadn't been for that strange little dreamlife of mine, wherein I imagined all the friends and love I craved. But when I came to Green Gables everything was changed. And then I met you. You don't know what your friendship meant to me. I want to thank you here and now, dear, for the warm and true affection you've always given me. ~ L.M. Montgomery

For some years now I have read through the Bible twice every year. If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant. ~ Martin Luther

Fear (...) that has no relation to capabilities or even to reality is epidemic among women today. Fear of being independent (that could mean we'd end up alone and uncared for); fear of being dependent (that could mean we'd be swallowed by some dominating "other"); fear of being competent and good at what we do (that could mean we'd have to keep on being good at what we do); fear of being incompetent (that could mean we'd have to keep on feeling shlumpy, depressed, and second class).
(...)
Phobia has so thoroughly infiltrated the feminine experience it is like a secret plague. It has been built up over long years by social conditioning and is all the more insidious for being so thoroughly acculturated we do not even recognize what has happened to us.
Women will not become free until they stop being afraid. We will not begin to experience real change in our lives, real emancipation, until we begin the process - almost a de-brainwashing - of working through the anxieties that prevent us from feeling competent and whole. ~ Colette Dowling

Dressed in new jeans, a light blue dress shirt and a red patterned tie, he stood at Heather's grave with his eyes closed. Although I didn't hear him, his lips were moving like he was praying. In the faint breeze, Mother Nature ran her fingers through his dark hair like I wanted to. He looked tall and strong, the way he used to, but somewhere along the way, without me, he'd stepped into the shoes of a man. And a part of me ached for those missing years. ~ Jordan Dane

I like vintage stuff. I go through a vintage store and find things that I feel like I fit right into them because of all the years that they've been used. ~ Channing Tatum

I've dreamed of you. Through the years, when I believed I'd never leave the shield world and had accepted that as my death…I still dreamed of you. ~ Rebecca Zanetti

To be straight, I was kind of a dork, and in order to fulfill the creative fires burning inside me, I participated vigorously as a Civil War re-enactor through most of my teenage years, traveling across the country to participate in large scale reenactments - grandiose plays enacted by over weight history buffs and war enthusiasts alike. ~ Cary Fukunaga

I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me. ~ Donna Tartt

Personally, I've come to understand that I haven't been on a journey to give my house a coffee enema and make it whistle-clean from top to bottom. I take way too much joy in rediscovering all those things that I've been collecting since I was a kid, always searching for the things that felt "real"--things that felt genuine, had stories.

I shouldn't have to give up my love of going through old boxes and making discoveries of things I forgot existed or imagined must have been given away years ago, as if I've sent a care package to myself from some distant past I only half-remember. Suddenly, surprisingly, a box full of memories will bring it all back into sharp focus. ~ Eve O. Schaub

Come from the heart, the true heart, not the head. When in doubt, choose the heart. This does not mean to deny your own experiences and that which you have empirically learned through the years. It means to trust your self to integrate intuition and experience. There is a balance, a harmony to be nurtured, between the head and the heart. When the intuition rings clear and true, loving impulses are favored. ~ Brian L. Weiss

On Friday night, you stole the life of an exceptional being, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hate. I don't know who you are and I don't want to know. You are dead souls. If that God for whom you blindly kill made us in his image, every bullet in my wife's body will have been a wound in his heart.

So, no, I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you. That is what you want, but to respond to your hate with anger would be to yield to the same ignorance that made you what you are. You want me to be scared, to see my fellow citizens through suspicious eyes, to sacrifice my freedom for security. You have failed. I will not change.

I saw her this morning. At last, after days and nights of waiting. She was as beautiful as when she went out on Friday evening, as beautiful as when I fell madly in love with her more than twelve years ago. Of course I'm devastated by grief, I grant you that small victory, but it will be short-lived. I know that she will be with us every day and that we will see each other in the paradise of free souls to which you will never have access.

There are only two of us – my son and myself – but we are stronger than all the armies of the world. Anyway, I don't have any more time to waste on you, as I must go to see Melvil, who is waking up from his nap. He is only seventeen months old. He will eat his snack as he does every day, then we will play as we do every day, and all his life this ~ Antoine Leiris

As life goes on, you will join other bands, some through friendship, some through romance, some through neighborhoods, school, an army. Maybe you will all dress the same, or laugh at your own private vocabulary. Maybe you will flop on couches backstage, or share a boardroom table, or crowd around a galley inside a ship. But in each band you join, you will play a distinct part, and it will affect you as much as you affect it. ~ Mitch Albom

Africa has been going through so much for so many years; it's time that it stands up the way other nations are standing up. ~ Nas

Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative ... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture. ~ Jared Diamond

We will have to see whether the practicing through the years has prepared me for the writing of a book. For this is the book I have always wanted and have worked and prayed to be able to write. We shall see whether I am capable. Surely I feel humble in the face of this work. And as our Roman friends would say when casting outside themselves for help, Ora pro mihi. February ~ John Steinbeck

What remains of the dead? What remains of every one of us?

Tombstones sink in, moss covers them, and after a few centuries the name can no longer be read. Every forgotten grave is designated a new corpse.

As the generations passed, remembrance of the dead diminished until it was forgotten. What was called everlasting peace only lasted half a century. The bones were disturbed as the graveyards were mulched in to suburbs.

The earth had become too small, for the living and the dead. In half a century a funeral had become a luxury that only few could afford who had died before judgment day. But who cares about a single body when the whole planet is dying.

[...]

Earlier the remains of humanity had only had the right to be there as long as the living remembered them. A human being remembers their relatives, their friends and colleagues. But his conscience only reached back three generations before it faded away. Just more then fifty years.

With the same ease, you let the picture of our grandfather or your friend from school out of our conscience into absolute nothingness. The memories of a human can last longer than the bones, but as soon as the last one who remembered us has passed we dissolve with time.

[...]

Back then there was almost no more space in the thick family album for old and brown turned pictures, but almost nobody that looked through it could say for sure who was on the photos. ~ Dmitry Glukhovsky

I learned my French through school. I was lucky in that the tutor on 'The Wonder Years' set spoke fluent French. ~ Danica McKellar

Although psychology and pedagogy have always maintained the belief that a child is a happy being without any conflicts, and have assumed that the sufferings of adults are the results of the burdens and hardships of reality, it must be asserted that just the opposite is true. What we learn about the child and the adult through psychoanalysis shows that all the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of these earlier ones, and that every child in the first years of life goes through and immeasurable degree of suffering. ~ Melanie Klein

Some think Grom felt the pull toward Nalia," Toraf says softly. "Maybe it's a family trait."
"Well, there's where you're wrong, Toraf. I'm not supposed to feel the pull toward Emma. She belongs to Grom. He's firstborn, third generation Triton. And she's clearly of Poseidon." Galen runs his hand through his hair.
"I think that if Grom were her mate, he would have found Emma somehow instead of you."
"That's what you get for thinking. I didn't find Emma. Dr. Milligan did."
"Okay, answer me this," Toraf says, shaking a finger at Galen. "You're twenty years old. Why haven't you sifted for a mate?"
Galen blinks. He's never thought of it, actually. Not even when Toraf asked for Rayna. Shouldn't that have reminded him of his own single status? He shakes his head. He's letting Toraf's gossip get to him. He shrugs. "I've just been busy. It's not like I don't want to, if that's what you're saying."
"With who?"
"What?"
"Name someone, Galen. The first female that comes to mind."
He tries to block out her name, her face. But he doesn't stop it in time. Emma. He cringes. It's just that we've been talking about her so much, she's naturally the freshest on my mind, he tells himself. "There isn't anyone yet. But I'm sure there would be if I spent more time at home."
"Right. And why is that you're always away? Maybe you're searching for something and don't even know it."
"I'm away because I'm watching the humans, as is my responsibility, yo ~ Anna Banks

All through the years of our youth
Neither could have known
Their own thought from the other's,
We were so much at one. ~ William Butler Yeats

i'm learning that life frequently does this to me. first it offers you an impossible challenge. which you can't refuse. then it breaks your spirit by messing with your ballpoint pen. these may seem like isolated events that can be explained away as coincidences, but i fear not. it's happened far too often to me to be a coincidence. it's this kind of thing that convinces me that i'm not going to make forty and my death will most probably be humiliating and painful - a death that people will still laugh about in three hundred years' time. one day i'm going to sift through every single entry of all my diaries and mark down how many times a stroke of 'bad luck' has followed the issuing of severe test in my life . . . ~ John Van De Ruit

When I was twelve years old, I looked in the mirror and I saw what I perceived to be my faults and my mother's faults. These coalesced into a dark mark that I would carry through my life, a coating of what I saw, which came from others' hatred of me, and all this forested a hatred of myself. I thought being unwanted and abandoned and persecuted was the legacy of the poor southern Black woman. But as an adult, I see my mother's legacy anew. I see how all the burdens she bore, the burdens of her history and identity and of our country's history and identity , enable her to manifest her greatest gifts. My mother had the courage to look at four hungry children and find a way to fill them. My mother had the strength to work her body to its breaking point to provide for herself and her children. My mother had the residence to cobble together a family from the broken bits of another. And my mother's example teaches me other things: This how a transplanted people survived a holocaust and slavery. This is how Black people in the South organized to vote under the shadow of terrorism and the noose. This is how human begins sleep and wake and fight and survive. In the end, this is a how a mother teaches her daughter to have courage, to have strength, to be resilient, to open her eyes to what it is, and to make something of it. ~ Jesmyn Ward

When I was a child, the lessons my father taught me had been about perseverance, never to accept limitations that stood in my way. As an adult, watching him in his final years, I also saw how to come to terms with limits that couldn't simply be wished away. When to shift from pushing against limits to making the best of them is not often readily apparent. But it is clear that are times when the cost of pushing exceeds its value. Helping my father through the struggle to define that moment was simultaneously among the most painful and most privileged experiences of my life. Part of the way my father handled the limits he faced was by looking at them without illusion. Though his circumstances sometimes got him down, he never pretended they were better than they were. He always understood that life is short and one's place in the world is small. But he also saw himself as a link in a chain of history. ~ Atul Gawande

Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, 'Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist' and, if we get our way, Shakespeare will still be read even in school. ~ John Major

Most frequently given of such reasons is the conviction that a general stock market decline of some proportion is somewhere in the offing. In the preceding chapter I tried to show that postponing an attractive purchase because of fear of what the general market might do will, over the years, prove very costly. This is because the investor is ignoring a powerful influence about which he has positive knowledge through fear of a less powerful force about which, in the present state of human knowledge, he and everyone else is largely guessing. ~ Philip A. Fisher

I want to stay with the Orioles. I'd like to play here for the rest of my career. I don't want to go through this again in four years. ~ Brady Anderson

I can arrange words on a page but I can't seem to organize books on a shelf. Over the years, My Secret has shelved thousands and thousands, held each one in his hands. He thinks they might have seeped into him, through his skin, as much as the books he's read. At night and on his days off we spend hours talking about writing. He reads three or four books at a time. When he's not working at the bookstore he goes to other bookstores around the city and browses until closing time. Holding more volumes in his hands, filling himself up with words. ~ Francesca Lia Block

Ridiculed as "Knox the knave" and "a runagate Scot," he was outlawed and forbidden to preach by the archbishop of St. Andrews, and orders were issued that he be shot on sight if he failed to comply.
Knox did not comply. Years later, a would-be assassin fired a shot through a window of Knox's house in Edinburgh, narrowly missing his mark.? Still Knox preached. ~ Douglas Bond

Sorgan tried his very best not to think about how long it must have taken for a stream that small to eat its way down through solid rock to form its current bed. Sorgan knew exactly what the word "hundred" meant, but when numbers wandered off toward "thousand" - or even "million" - and the people who used those terms were talking about years, Sorgan's mind shied back in horror. ~ David Eddings

I got that experience through dating dozens of men for six years after college, getting an entry level magazine job at 21, working in the fiction department at Good Housekeeping and then working as a fashion editor there as well as writing many articles for the magazine. ~ Judith Krantz