Browsing Quotes With Tag: friendship (85)
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I remember going to sleep last night, and I realized something. Something that I think is important. I realized that throughout the course of the evening, I wasn’t happy about Craig and Sam breaking up. Not at all.
I never once thought that it would mean Sam might start liking me. All I cared about was the fact that Sam got really hurt. And I guess I realized at that moment that I really did love her. Because there was nothing to gain, and that didn’t matter.Speaker: Stephen ChboskyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 4:45 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There was this one part where the main character, who is this architect, is sitting on a boat with his best friend, who is a newspaper tycoon. And the newspaper tycoon says that the architect is a very cold man. The architect replies that if the boat were sinking, and there was only room in the lifeboat for one person, he would gladly give up his life for the newspaper tycoon. And then he says something like this…
“I would die for you. But I won’t live for you.”
Something like that. I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people. Maybe that is what makes people “participate.” I’m not really certain. Because I don’t know if I would mind living for Sam for a while.Speaker: Stephen ChboskyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 4:44 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“I feel infinite.”
And Sam and Patrick looked at me like I said the greatest thing they ever heard. Because the song was that great and because we all really paid attention to it. Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spent, and we felt young in a good way. I have since bought the record, and I would tell you what it was, but truthfully, it’s not the same unless you’re driving to your first real party, and you’re sitting in the middle seat of a pickup with two nice people when it starts to rain.Speaker: Stephen ChboskyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 4:26 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Now, let’s get something straight: you are not in my debt. Impossible – because I never do anything I don’t want to. Nor does anyone, but in my case I know it. So please don’t invent a debt that does not exist, or next you will be trying to feel gratitude – and that is the treacherous first step toward complete moral degradation.”
Speaker: Robert HeinleinPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:52 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
What planet did this woman live on? She was so unworldly that she seemed to him to be an unlikely suicidal depressive, even though she sang with her eyes closed: surely anyone who floated that high above everything was protected in some way? But of course that was part of the problem. They were sitting here because a twelve-year-old’s craftiness had brought her crashing down to earth, and if Marcus could do it, any boyfriend or boss or landlord – any adult who didn’t love her – could do it. There was no protection in that. Why did these people want to make things so hard for themselves? It was easy life, easy peasy, a matter of simple arithmetic: loving people, and allowing yourself to be loved, was only worth the risk if the odds were in your favour, but they quite clearly weren’t. There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. So how smart did you have to be to work out that it just wasn’t worth the risk?
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: About a BoyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:21 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It’s only just beginning to occur to me that it’s important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you’re just clinging on. If I lived in Bosnia, then not having a girlfriend wouldn’t seem like the most important thing in the world, but here in Crouch End it does. You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it’s just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who’d believe in this character then? I’ve got to get more stuff, more clutter, more detail in here, because at the moment I’m in danger of falling off the edge.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:09 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Quite clearly, I needed two heads, to heads being better than one and all that. One would have to be the old one, just because the old one knows people’s names and phone numbers, and which breakfast cereal I prefer, and so on; the second one would be able to observe and interpret the behavior of the first, in the manner of a television wildlife expert. Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that other people have heads, and that any one of these heads would do a better job of explaining what the purpose of my explosion might have been. This, I supposed, was why people persisted with the whole notion of friends.Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:03 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. (Be long. Belong. Get it?) you don’t know how long, though. It’s not your choice. Maureen’s rope ties her to Matty and it’s about six inches long and it’s killing her. Martin’s rope ties him to his daughters and, like a stupid dog, he thinks it isn’t there. He goes running off somewhere – into a nightclub after a girl, up a building, whatever – and then suddenly it brings him up short and chokes him and he acts surprised, and then he does the same thing again the next day.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:55 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Apologies are not pass/fail. I always told my students: When giving an apology, any performance lower than an A really doesn’t cut it.
Halfhearted or insincere apologies are often worse than not apologizing at all because recipients find them insulting. If you’ve done something wrong in your dealings with another person, it’s as if there’s an infection in your relationship. A good apology is like an antibiotic; a bad apology is like rubbing salt in the wound.Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:56 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Kavita stood to give me a hug. It was the tender, close hug that a woman gives a man when she knows she can trust him, or when she’s sure his heart belongs to someone else. It was a rare enough embrace between foreigners. Coming from an Indian woman, it was uniquely intimate in my experience. And it was important. I’d been in the city for years; I could make myself understood in Marathi, Hindi, and Urdu; I could sit with gangsters, slum-dwellers, or Bollywood actors, claiming their goodwill and sometimes their respect; but few things made me feel as accepted, in all the Indian worlds of Bombay, as Kavita Singh’s fond embrace.
I never told her that – what her affectionate and unconditional acceptance meant to me. So much, too much, of the good that I felt in those years of exile was locked in the prison cell of my heart: those tall walls of fear; that small, barred window of hope; that hard bed of shame. I do speak out now. I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:37 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
But I was alone, and for two reasons. The mafia was theirs, not mine. For them, the organization always came first. But I was loyal to the men, not the mafia; to the brothers, not the brotherhood. I worked for the mafia, but I didn’t join it. I’m not a joiner. I never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:33 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future. People knew that once, deep within the ur-mind, the ur-imagination. You can still find those who decorate doorways, and reverently salute them, in every culture, from Ireland to Japan. I stepped up one, two steps, and reached out with my right hand to touch the doorjamb and then touch my chest, over the heart, in a salaam to fate and a homage to the dead friends and enemies who entered with me.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:32 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
A mujaheddin fighter once told me that fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them. Khader was one of my twelve, but his disguise was always the best. In those abandoned, angry days, as my grieving heart limped into numbing despair, I began to think of him as my enemy; my beloved enemy.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:06 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn’t, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it’s impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:40 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The devil, they say, is in the details, and I knew well the devils that lurked and skulked in the details of my own story. But she had given me a hoard of new treasures. I’d learned more about here in that exhausted, murmuring hour than in all the many months before it. Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:33 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Friendship is something that gets harder to understand, every damn year of my life. Friendship is like a kind of algebra test that nobody passes. In my worst moods, I think the best you can say is that a friend is anyone you don’t despise.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:52 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“You’re a good listener. That’s dangerous, because it’s so hard to resist. Being listened to – really listened to – is the second-best thing in the world.”
“What’s the first best thing?”
“Everybody knows that. The best thing in the world is power.”
“Oh, is it?” I asked, laughing. “What about sex?”
“No. Apart from biology, sex is all about power. That’s why it’s such a rush.”
I laughed again.
“And what about love? A lot of people say that love is the best thing in the world, not power.”
“They’re wrong,” she said with terse finality. “Love is the opposite of power. That’s why we fear it so much.”Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:46 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Cast out an honest friend, and you cast out
Your life, your dearest treasure…” CreonSpeaker: SophoclesPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:22 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.
Speaker: Kurt VonnegutPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:03 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The wise man, nevertheless, unequaled though he is in his devotion to his friends, though regarding them as being no less important and frequently more important than his own self, will still consider what is valuable in life to be something wholly confined to his inner self.
Speaker: SenecaPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 7:43 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!