Nine Years Of Friendship Quotes

Because the end of a friendship isn’t even formally acknowledged—no Little Talk, no papers served—you walk around effectively heartbroken but embarrassed to admit it, even to yourself. It’s a special, open-ended kind of pain, like having a disease that doesn’t even have a name. You worry you must be pathetically oversensitive to feel so wounded over such a thing. You can’t tell people, “My friend broke up with me,” without sounding like a nine-year-old. The only phrase I can think of that even recognizes this kind of hurt—“You look like you just lost your best friend”—is only ever spoken by adults to children. You can give yourself the same ineffectual lecture your parents used to give you as a kid: anyone who’d treat you this way isn’t a very good friend and doesn’t deserve your friendship anyway. But the nine-year-old in you knows that the reason they’ve ditched you is that you suck.

Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since. I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since. But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen. As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal. But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong. Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant. The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too. The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up. I mean, what does a child know about faith? It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known. Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about. Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg. I was devastated. I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life. ‘Please, God, comfort me.’ Blow me down … He did. My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.) To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies. This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes. The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life. This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being. Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree. I had found a calling for my life.

Raven had been shunned and abandoned throughout his life. Friends often came and went without a word or worse, they toyed with his emotions and shared his secrets with those he chose to distrust. His loneliness was inevitable and his secrets were damaging enough. Through all of his largely brief but emotionally involved friendships and infatuations, the depression and the darkness of his past, there had been one place to which he could go for solitude—either in thought or in person—and he never shared the knowledge of its existence or its secrets with anyone. That place dwelled within him even all of these years since the summer when he was nine and all that could ever have gone wrong, did.

Scott's friends on the forum didn't know his big picture. They read a phrase like "It's going to kill me to live without him" for its precise meaning, and nothing else. They didn't read more than those nine words into the message. They didn't take offense, didn't try to talk him out of it. Didn't resent it for its presumed relativity. "Of course it is," they said. And it was the same way they'd responded to every other thing he'd told them about himself: his thoughts on parenting, on marriage and sex, on education and race. They read what he wrote, and only what he wrote, and they responded. Not always in agreement - he'd had plenty of heated discussions over the past year on this issue or that. But he didn't need yes-men any more than he needed someone to read twenty-one extra words into the nine he'd written.

You’re like a nuclear missile, you’re dropped somewhere and cause devastation all around. You’ve always been that way. And I figured you’d come here and just fucking destroy everything that stood against me, like you do all the time. I wanted to tell you, I really did, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t risk you saying no, to the whole plan going out the window.” I got off Galahad, who adjusted his suit, but didn’t bother getting back to his feet. “Do you even know what Simon was here for?” “No, although we will. A few years in a dungeon will loosen his tongue a little.” “I never thought you’d be on the receiving end of my anger,” I said softly. “I always thought you’d be honest with me. That you knew how I felt after leaving Merlin, leaving behind the lies and manipulations. But I was wrong. You’re just shittier at it than he was.” “I have more important things to do than lament whatever has broken in our friendship,” he said, anger leaking from every syllable. “I think you should leave this city and this state.” “You’re having me kicked out?” Galahad shook his head. “I’ll be putting Bill Moon in charge of the investigation into what happened here. We’ll make things more palatable for the humans living here, and then we’ll be taking Simon back to Shadow Falls.” “And Rean?” “He has refused my aid and vanished with his remaining colony into the woods. Nine out of twenty-two died today, I doubt he wishes to involve himself with the affairs of anyone other than his colony.” “You lost two allies in space of a day and damaged your reputation as a ruler who takes care of his own. Congrats. You must be very proud.” “I think we’re done here,” he said and got back to his feet once more. I took a step toward him and I noticed something in his expression. Fear. But not fear of me, Galahad would never have been scared of me, but maybe the fear of what had been lost between us, and my anger evaporated, replaced with sadness. “Galahad, you should know something,” I said, gaining his attention as he walked off toward the house. He stopped at the open door and glanced back at me. “What is it?” “I’m not a nuclear bomb, I’m a scalpel. I cut away the tumors and diseased flesh that threatens to consume everything. So, you need to be very careful that during your reign, you don’t become something that requires my utmost attention.” And with that, I turned and walked away.

If we consider the possibility that all women–from the infant suckling her mother’s breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother’s milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women–exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of woman-identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of eight- or nine-year-olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who “shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates … in cheap subdivided houses in the artisans’ area of town,” who “practiced Christian virtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associating with men,” who earned their livings as spinners, bakers, nurses, or ran schools for young girls, and who managed–until the Church forced them to disperse–to live independent both of marriage and of conventual restrictions. It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated “Lesbians” of the women’s school around Sappho of the seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resistance sisterhoods–communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands–the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women’s strikes in the silk mills. It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius, with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel father’s house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon. Hurston married twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of white patronage and poverty, professional success and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters, committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as “apolitical ”. Both were drawn to men of intellectual quality; for both of them women provided the ongoing fascination and sustenance of life.

After the Accident Before we run out of pages, I want to tell you a little of what happened to my family after the accident. My mother moved to a small house in Western Shore. Her first concern was finding a way to support herself and Ricky. Being an ex-dancer, motorcycle rider, and treasure-hunter was not likely to open any doors, so she decided to go back to school. She enrolled in a business course in Bridgewater and began her first studies since she was 12 years old. Soon she earned a diploma in typing, shorthand, and accounting, and was hired to work in a medical clinic. Ricky had been on the island from age nine to 14, mostly in the company of adults--family members and visiting tourists--but hardly ever with anyone his own age. Life on the mainland, with the give and take and bumps and bruises of high-school life was a challenge. But he survived. In time he became a carpenter, and is alive and well and living in Ottawa. My mother made a new life for herself. She remained fiercely independent, but between a job she loved and her neighbors, she formed friendships that were deep and lasting. Of course, she missed Dad and Bobby terribly. My mother and dad had been a perfect match, and my mother and brother had always shared a special bond. Bobby’s death was especially hard on her. My mother felt responsible. One day, before the accident, Bobby had taken all he could of Oak Island. After a heated argument with Dad, Bobby packed up and left. My mother had gone after him and convinced him to return--his dad needed him. She rarely spoke of it, but that weighed heavily on her for the rest of her years. My mother never left the east coast. She was 90 years old when she died. For the last 38 years of her life, she lived in a small house on a hill, in the community of Western Shore, where, from her living room window, she could look out and see Oak Island.

That summer, the month he turned twenty-nine, my brother had proposed to his girlfriend, the one he’d met four years earlier, just before coming to stay with me in Brooklyn. Nearly everyone from high school and most of my friends from college were married, or soon to be, and as for ex-boyfriends: W married in 2005; R met his soon-to-be wife in 2006 (today both couples have two children). Even the close friends I’d made in New York were “joining the vast majority,” as Neith had put it. All of us wanted to believe this wouldn’t change anything. But it did, invariably, in ways small and large. It’s a rare friendship that transcends the circumstances that forged it, and being single together in the city, no matter how powerful a bond when it’s happening, can prove pretty weak glue. Alliances had been redrawn, resources shifted and reconsolidated; new envies replaced the old. Whereas before we were all broke together, now they had husbands splitting the rent and bills, and I couldn’t shake my awareness of this difference. A treacherous, unspoken sense of inequality set in, which only six months into my new magazine job had radically reversed: I’d become the one who could afford nice restaurants while they had to channel their disposable incomes toward a shared household, and I felt their unspoken judgment just as before they’d felt mine. One newly married friend lashed out at me for never inviting her to parties. I tried to explain: Didn’t she see I was going because someone else had invited me? And that if I didn’t go, I’d be home alone, whereas she had someone to keep her company? When a dear friend said, “You know, I may be married now, but I’m still just like you! I can still do whatever I want!” I blanched. She’d been on her own so recently herself. Didn’t she remember that being single is more than just following your whims—that it also means having nobody to help you make difficult decisions, or comfort you at the end of a bad week?

Dear Brian, You have helped me through so much these past four years. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't be who I am today. I mean that in a good way. I can't begin to thank you for the many ways you've affected my life so I won't even try. Just know that whatever happens in the future, you will always be a part of me. I hope that you and I remain friends for the rest of our lives... If only we had more time in which to be young. Love, Michael

During my nine years at Saturday Night Live, my relationship with Lorne transitioned from "Terrified Pupil and Reluctant Teacher" to "Small-Town Girl and Street-Wise Madam showing her the ropes" to "Annie and Daddy Warbucks" (touring company) to one of mutual respect and friendship.

Mid June 2012 Good morning Andy, I hope today brings you good cheer and bounteous energy. We certainly have been through some tough times since our separation. Back in the late 80s to the mid-90s, I too experienced a negative relationship like you and Toby. My relationship with Kregory, an American from Wisconsin, lasted for nine years. It came to a screeching halt one day in August 1996 when he suddenly disappeared from our apartment and my life. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. The universe had again intervened on my behalf when it was time for a new beginning. I will relate this life’s chapter at a later date. It breaks my heart to learn that you went through a difficult period with Toby. I’m glad those days are behind us. I believe that I emerged from those horrendous experiences to become wiser, stronger and better-equipped for life’s challenges. You, my dearest ‘big brother,’ have always been my guiding light, and I’m positive that you, too, returned unscathed through adversities. I, for one, am grateful for my Bahriji education and treasured E.R.O.S. experiences. Without this priceless enlightenment and knowledge, my life would have turned out differently and would have been difficult to grapple with. Now that we have reconnected, it’s also the beginning to a new friendship. If the universe chooses to bring us together again, time is our guiding star. For now, I’m gratified to be corresponding regularly with my ex-lover, Valet, mentor, and guardian.

Caroline, now nine, was eager to meet the Princess of Wales, who had become her ideal of beauty and grace. Her favorite book for years had been Royal Style Wars, which consisted of hundreds of color photographs by Tim Graham of Diana and the Duchess of York. Caroline and her friends in Jakarta loved to pore over the color pages to compare Diana’s fashion sense to Fergie’s. Diana always won out in their biased judgment. Caroline wanted to see her dream pictures in person. She was terribly envious that her brother had been the baby lucky enough to have a fairytale nanny.

Matters of days & Time. In dis life what matters is days and time your storm will be over. It takes God six days to creat the word and one day to rest. It takes nine for a child to form in the wormb. And a day to give brith. It takes a days and time to creat a friendship and one single lie to spoil the hole things. It takes years and tym to find true love and one single day to get married. No matter wha you are passing through one. Day is your day.

It is the most unusual friendship: One is pint-sized. Just nine years old and full of life. But she’s not full of life lived. She’s full of dreams and a life yet to live. The other has already lived a beautiful life. At the age of eighty-one, she wonders just where the finish line is and at what speed she’ll cross it.

I was beginning to believe that it is foolish and perhaps pretentious and often boring, as well as damnably expensive, to make a meal of four or six courses just because the guests who are to eat it have always been used to that many. Let them try eating two or three things, I said, so plentiful and so interesting and so well cooked that they will be satisfied. And if they are not satisfied, let them stay away from our table, and our leisurely comfortable friendship at that table. I talked like that, and it worried Al a little, because he had been raised in a minister's family and had been taught that the most courteous way to treat guests was to make them feel as if they were in their own homes. I, to his well-controlled embarrassment, was beginning to feel quite sure that one of the best things I could do for nine-tenths of the people I knew was to give them something that would make them forget Home and all it stood for, for a few blessed moments at least.

M. Romains had taken many journeys in his country’s interest and at his own expense. He had talked with the statesmen of fourteen European lands. Three years ago he had traveled to Berlin and delivered a lecture under government auspices. Brownshirted leaders had been summoned from all over the land to hear him, and one of the top-flight Nazis had said to him: “You know, no private individual has ever been received like this in Berlin.” The philosopher-novelist had also been welcomed by the King of the Belgians, who had discussed frankly that country’s attitude to the gravely threatened war. As M. Romains told about these matters, you couldn’t doubt that he was patriotically in earnest, but also you couldn’t help feeling that he was intensely impressed by his own importance. His plan was the one known as le couple France-Allemagne, and it meant reconcilation with Germany, by the simple method of giving the Nazis whatever they demanded. For example, he had had the idea that the Allies should have got out of the Saar without the formality of a plebiscite. Lanny happened to know that Briand had been trying to work out some compromise on this question as far back as ten years ago; but apparently M. Romains didn’t know that, and certainly it wasn’t up to Lanny to correct him on his facts. The philosopher-novelist seemed to have the idea that the Saar settlement had been a matter between France and Germany, and that the plebiscite had taken place under French military control, whereas the fact was it had been a League matter, and French troops had been withdrawn nine years before the plebiscite was held. Among the members of that attentive audience was Kurt Meissner, who had met the Frenchman many years ago in Emily’s drawing-room. Evidently he had put his opportunity to good use, for it was just as if M. Romains had sat in a seminar conducted by the Wehrmacht’s agent, had absorbed the entire doctrine, and was now giving an oral dissertation to demonstrate what he had learned and get his degree. His discourse embraced the complete Nazi program for the undermining of the French republic: warm protestations of friendship; unlimited promises of peace; the sowing of distrust of all politicians and of the entire democratic procedure; and, above all else, fear of the Red specter. The Reds kept faith with nobody, their country was a colossus with feet of clay, their army a broken reed upon which France persisted in trying to lean. The republic had to choose between Stalin and Hitler; between an illusory military alliance and a secure and enduring peace. The words burned Lanny’s tongue: “M. Romains, have you ever read Mein Kampf?” Of course, Lanny couldn’t say them; but he wondered, how would this somewhat self-conscious idol of the bourgeois world have replied? Lanny recalled the Max Beerbohm cartoon in which a drawing-room fop is asked if he has read a certain book, and replies: “I do not read books; I write them.

IN 1971, as the Vietnam War was heading into its sixteenth year, congressmen Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy from Illinois made a discovery that stunned the American public. While visiting the troops, they had learned that over 15 percent of U.S. soldiers stationed there were heroin addicts. Follow-up research revealed that 35 percent of service members in Vietnam had tried heroin and as many as 20 percent were addicted—the problem was even worse than they had initially thought. The discovery led to a flurry of activity in Washington, including the creation of the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention under President Nixon to promote prevention and rehabilitation and to track addicted service members when they returned home. Lee Robins was one of the researchers in charge. In a finding that completely upended the accepted beliefs about addiction, Robins found that when soldiers who had been heroin users returned home, only 5 percent of them became re-addicted within a year, and just 12 percent relapsed within three years. In other words, approximately nine out of ten soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam eliminated their addiction nearly overnight. This finding contradicted the prevailing view at the time, which considered heroin addiction to be a permanent and irreversible condition. Instead, Robins revealed that addictions could spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical change in the environment. In Vietnam, soldiers spent all day surrounded by cues triggering heroin use: it was easy to access, they were engulfed by the constant stress of war, they built friendships with fellow soldiers who were also heroin users, and they were thousands of miles from home. Once a soldier returned to the United States, though, he found himself in an environment devoid of those triggers. When the context changed, so did the habit. Compare this situation to that of a typical drug user. Someone becomes addicted at home or with friends, goes to a clinic to get clean—which is devoid of all the environmental stimuli that prompt their habit—then returns to their old neighborhood with all of their previous cues that caused them to get addicted in the first place. It’s no wonder that usually you see numbers that are the exact opposite of those in the Vietnam study. Typically, 90 percent of heroin users become re-addicted once they return home from rehab.

So with the endorsement of the Chamber of Commerce, in 1980 Sparky Harper invited fifty travel writers from all newspapers all across North America to come to Miami during Orange Bowl Week and sail the Friendship Cruise. Of course, 1980 was the year of the Liberty City Riots and the Mariel Boatlift, so only nine travel writers showed up, several of them carrying guns for protection.

There are almost no trees in Iceland, and the few that exist are all in the cemeteries; as if there were no dead without trees, as if there were no trees without the dead. They are not planted alongside the grave, as in idyllic Central Europe, but right in the center of it, to force a passerby to imagine the roots down below piercing the body. I am walking with Elvar D. in the Reykjavik cemetery; he stops at a grave whose tree is still quite small; barely a year ago his friend was buried; he starts reminiscing aloud about him: his private life was marked by some secret, probably a sexual one. "Because secrets excite such irritated curiosity, my wife, my daughters, the people around me, all insisted I tell them about it. To such an extent that my relations with my wife have been bad ever since. I couldn't forgive her aggressive curiosity, and she couldn't forgive my silence, which to her was evidence of how little I trusted her." He smiled, and then: "I divulged nothing," he said. "Because I had nothing to divulge. I had forbidden myself to want to know my friends secrets, and I didn't know them." I listened to him with fascination: since childhood I had heard it said that a friend is the person with whom you share your secrets and who even has the right, in the name of friendship, to insist on knowing them. For my Icelander, friendship is something else: it is standing guard at the door behind which your friend keeps his private life hidden; it is being the person who never opens that door; who allows no one else to open it.

Your friends become your tormentors. Although, come on, they’re not bullying you, you just can’t take a joke! The psychological warfare puts Putin to shame. One day you come into school and you say hi to your supposed friends, but, overnight they’ve been discussing how terrible you are behind your back and are now freezing you out without admitting that’s what they’re doing. So they’ll go for lunch without you but say they forgot. Or you’ll be walking home and they’ll all just randomly run off and leave you there, laughing, pretending it’s ok. A female friendship group will then hold a little “committee,” telling their chosen victim, in grown-up voices, everything that’s wrong with them as a person and how nobody wants to be their friend anymore, and…why are you crying? We’re just trying to be honest, jeez. Year Nine. We should all get a special medal and six month of counseling on the NHS.