Separation Friendship Quotes

Can miles truly separate you from friends... If you want to be with someone you love, aren't you already there?

There is nothing more dreadful than the habit of doubt. Doubt separates people. It is a poison that disintegrates friendships and breaks up pleasant relations. It is a thorn that irritates and hurts; it is a sword that kills.

Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation.

We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.

A messy house is a must - it separates your true friends from other friends. Real friends are there to visit you not your house!

Always remember that you were once alone, and the crowd you see in your life today are just as unecessary as when you were alone.

The distant soul can shake the distant friend's soul and make the longing felt, over untold miles.

In every friendship hearts grow and entwine themselves together, so that the two hearts seem to make only one heart with only a common thought. That is why separation is so painful; it is not so much two hearts separating, but one being torn asunder.

She peels an orange, separates it in perfect halves, and gives one of them to me. If I could wear it like a friendship bracelet, I would. Instead I swallow it section by section and tell myself it means even more this way. To chew and to swallow in silence here with her. To taste the same thing in the same moment.

They adore you beacause they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that's not true-' He took a deep breath. 'You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect you to need us.

How could I live without dancing?

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can spirits ever be divided, that love and live in the same divine principle, the root and record of their friendship. If absence be not death, neither is theirs. Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

The world needs someone they can admire from a distance; from a very far distance.

I worked hard at fitting in and becoming an American, but then I discovered that being an American was not enough. I had to be a Black American because that’s how Americans, especially whites, saw me.

I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend’s shortcomings, which sometimes included his parents.

Weddings have always been a fascinating thing to me. A time when people look in each others eyes and promise each other they will never allow anyone or anything to divide them. Out of two families, they come together to form a separate branch that links back to their roots. It's a time when two families are joined together because of the hearts of two people. A time when ill will and bad feelings should be put to rest along with the past. Weddings signify a new beginning. After all, no human alive has ever been able to choose his family...God knows, I would never have chosen mine. But as the Roman playwright Terence once wrote, 'From many a bad beginning great friendships have formed.' (Zarek)

Some of our friends are our friends only because we used to be friends.

their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.

Friendship isn´t be inseparable it's be separated and knowing nothing will change.

There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us. Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you "Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?" - Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent. Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn't. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.

Much depends on your attitude. If you are filled with negative judgment and anger, then you will feel separate from other people. You will feel lonely. But if you have an open heart and are filled with trust and friendship, even if you are physically alone, even living a hermit’s life, you will never feel lonely.

Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.

Separate yourself from those who hinder your vision. Make a choice to walk away from the trap set to ensnare you. Realize when someone is pulling you backwards every time you take a step forward. Separate from them and the result of your action will be a life of success.

It is said that one should keep one's allies within view, and one's enemies within reach. A valid statement. One must be able to read an ally's strengths, so as to determine how to best use them. One must similarly be able to read his enemy's weaknesses, so as to determine how to best defeat him. But what of friends? There is no accepted answer, perhaps true friendship is so exceedingly rare. But I had formulated my own. A friend need not be kept within sight or within reach. A friend must be allowed the freedom to find and follow his own path. If one is fortunate, those paths will for a time join. But if paths separate, it is comforting to know that a friend still graces the universe with his skills, and his viewpoint, and his present. For if one is remembered by a friend, one is never truly gone.

[That wall] might be breached sometime in the future, but for now the only real conversation between them was the roots that had already grown low and deep, under the wall, where they could not be broken. The most terrible thing, though, was the fear that the wall could never be breached, that in his heart Alai was glad of the separation, and was ready to be Ender's enemy. For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger, for he has a life now that will be no part of mine, and that means that when I see him we will not know each other.

With Wallace, Ali became one of the best-travelled young Malay men of the time.

A friend need not be kept either within sight or within reach. A friend must be allowed the freedom to find and follow his own path. If one is fortunate, those paths will for a time join. But if the paths separate, it is comforting to know that a friend still graces the universe with his skills, and his viewpoint, and his presence. For if one is remembered by a friend, one is never truly gone.

It was Cathy who taught me the true meaning of the word “risk.” Whenever I see that word written or hear it spoken, I see her face. I see her faith. I see her love and her youth when she took on this challenge. She perceived a need and didn’t wait for everything to fall into place before doing something about it. She did not wait until someone wrote the manual on How to be a Mother to a 19-Year-Old African Orphan When You’re Only 23.

To lose a worthless friend is worthy of a testimony.

I think of me and Melanie when we were younger, on the high dive at the pool in Mexico. We would always hold hands as we jumped, but by the time we swam back up to the surface, we'd have let go. No matter how we tried, once we started swimming, we always let go. But after we bobbed to the surface, we'd climb out of the pool, clamber up the high-dive ladder, clasp hands, and do it again. We're swimming separately now. I get that. Maybe it's just what you have to do to keep above water. But who knows? Maybe one day, we'll climb out, grab hands, and jumo again.

Jill and I have known each other our whole lives. One house separates our houses but we act as if it doesn't exist. We met before we were born and we'll probably still know each other after we die. At least, that's the way we're planning it.

You never waste your time. That's why I have to do it for you.

For a moment amongst the crowd, I saw you. I've since found out it's common for people separated from someone they love to keep seeing that loved one amongst strangers; something to do with recognition units in our brain being too heated and too easily triggered. This cruel trick of the mind lasted only a few moments, but was long enough to feel with physical force how much I needed you.

There was no black line separating Colorado from Utah. There was no black line between friendship and whatever might come next.

Can miles truly separate us from friends? If you want to be with Rae, aren't you already there?

...his jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. “I believe you. It’s okay because I understand and I believe you.

Geography and mileage mean nothing. Separate is a single word that covers all distances that aren't together.

Humans are like isolated islands, floating in the sea of fate. Human encounters are like the collision of these lonely islands, and once they touch, there would be an effect. Sometimes, the islands would stick together, in the name of ‘interest’, ‘kinship’, ‘friendship’, ‘love’ and ‘hate’. But eventually, they would separate, walking towards the path of destruction. This is the truth behind life.

A decade of friendship teaches you a lot of things: the tics that separate I’m sorry and I’m sorry you caught me, that hangdog expression that is really code for when the other person’s expecting you to fix their mess.

Simon had never dreamt that he would ever be on the stage receiving the plaudits of the entire school.

The sense of belonging together had been deeper than love.

The joy of meeting and the sorrow of separation … we should welcome these gifts … with our whole soul, and experience to the full, and with the same gratitude, all the sweetness or bitterness as the case may be. Meeting and separation are two forms of friendship that contain the same good, in the one case through pleasure and in the other through sorrow… Soon there will be distance between us. Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated.

Without the letters of condolence, telegrams of congratulations, and occasional postcards, the friendship of a separated friend is not a social reality. It has no existence without the rites of friendship. Social rituals create a reality which would be nothing without them. It is not too much to say that ritual is more to society than words are to thought. For it is very possible to know something and then find words for it. But it is impossible to have social relations without symbolic acts.

How To Tell If Somebody Loves You: Somebody loves you if they pick an eyelash off of your face or wet a napkin and apply it to your dirty skin. You didn’t ask for these things, but this person went ahead and did it anyway. They don’t want to see you looking like a fool with eyelashes and crumbs on your face. They notice these things. They really look at you and are the first to notice if something is amiss with your beautiful visage! Somebody loves you if they assume the role of caretaker when you’re sick. Unsure if someone really gives a shit about you? Fake a case of food poisoning and text them being like, “Oh, my God, so sick. Need water.” Depending on their response, you’ll know whether or not they REALLY love you. “That’s terrible. Feel better!” earns you a stay in friendship jail; “Do you need anything? I can come over and bring you get well remedies!” gets you a cozy friendship suite. It’s easy to care about someone when they don’t need you. It’s easy to love them when they’re healthy and don’t ask you for anything beyond change for the parking meter. Being sick is different. Being sick means asking someone to hold your hair back when you vomit. Either love me with vomit in my hair or don’t love me at all. Somebody loves you if they call you out on your bullshit. They’re not passive, they don’t just let you get away with murder. They know you well enough and care about you enough to ask you to chill out, to bust your balls, to tell you to stop. They aren’t passive observers in your life, they are in the trenches. They have an opinion about your decisions and the things you say and do. They want to be a part of it; they want to be a part of you. Somebody loves you if they don’t mind the quiet. They don’t mind running errands with you or cleaning your apartment while blasting some annoying music. There’s no pressure, no need to fill the silences. You know how with some of your friends there needs to be some sort of activity for you to hang out? You don’t feel comfortable just shooting the shit and watching bad reality TV with them. You need something that will keep the both of you busy to ensure there won’t be a void. That’s not love. That’s “Hey, babe! I like you okay. Do you wanna grab lunch? I think we have enough to talk about to fill two hours!" It’s a damn dream when you find someone you can do nothing with. Whether you’re skydiving together or sitting at home and doing different things, it’s always comfortable. That is fucking love. Somebody loves you if they want you to be happy, even if that involves something that doesn’t benefit them. They realize the things you need to do in order to be content and come to terms with the fact that it might not include them. Never underestimate the gift of understanding. When there are so many people who are selfish and equate relationships as something that only must make them happy, having someone around who can take their needs out of any given situation if they need to. Somebody loves you if they can order you food without having to be told what you want. Somebody loves you if they rub your back at any given moment. Somebody loves you if they give you oral sex without expecting anything back. Somebody loves you if they don’t care about your job or how much money you make. It’s a relationship where no one is selling something to the other. No one is the prostitute. Somebody loves you if they’ll watch a movie starring Kate Hudson because you really really want to see it. Somebody loves you if they’re able to create their own separate world with you, away from the internet and your job and family and friends. Just you and them. Somebody will always love you. If you don’t think this is true, then you’re not paying close enough attention.

...Having felt the piercing gash of grief and lived through it, having loved to the brink of brokenness, and having learned the difference between friendship and frivolity, one eventually takes a conscious step through the invisible membrane that separates hubris from humility...

As I’ve said, it wasn’t until a long time afterwards—long after I’d left the Cottages—that I realized just how significant out little encounter in the churchyard had been. I was upset at the time, yes. But I didn’t believe it to be anything so different from other tiffs we’d had. It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven could unravel and separate over a thing like that. But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we’d understood that back then—who knows?—maybe we’d have kept a tighter hold of one another.

Simon was fighting against being queer; all the social and professional pressures were against it even though homosexual acts between consenting adults in private were about to be decriminalised.

Many people will not be honest because they fear loss of intimacy and togetherness. In reality, honesty brings people closer together, for it will strengthen their identities. The more you realize your separate identities, the closer you can become. Telling loved ones what is really on your mind and telling others what you really think is the foundation of love.

He saw the moist tenderness of Daniel's lips afresh. He wanted to feel it again.

don't be sad if Allah separated you from something or someone you love. if only we knew what His plans were for us, our hearts would melt with the warmth of His love

The solitude of women's minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it's a waste to be separated from each other without procedures, without tradition.

[A]s people are beginning to see that the sexes form in a certain sense a continuous group, so they are beginning to see that Love and Friendship which have been so often set apart from each other as things distinct are in reality closely related and shade imperceptibly into each other. Women are beginning to demand that Marriage shall mean Friendship as well as Passion; that a comrade-like Equality shall be included in the word Love; and it is recognised that from the one extreme of a 'Platonic' friendship (generally between persons of the same sex) up to the other extreme of passionate love (generally between persons of opposite sex) no hard and fast line can at any point be drawn effectively separating the different kinds of attachment. We know, in fact, of Friendships so romantic in sentiment that they verge into love; we know of Loves so intellectual and spiritual that they hardly dwell in the sphere of Passion.

But this practice [vegetarianism], in which youthful love of austerity finds charm, calls for attentions more complicated than those of culinary refinement itself; and it separates us too much from the common run of men in a function which is nearly always public, and in which either friendship or formality presides.

I certainly should have,' he agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally-accepted bit of nonsense it is, that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you. As if there weren't far too much understanding in the world already; above all, that understanding between lovers, celebrated in song and story, which is actually such torture that no two of them can bear it without frequent separations or fights.

—Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend. —I will take the risk, said Stephen. —And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.

There are two forms of friendship: meeting and separation. They are indissoluble. Both of them contain some good, and this good of friendship is unique, for when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation. As both forms contain the same good thing, they are both equally good.

He was like the other half of myself,' says Boris...Ulrich says, 'You haven't lost {him}, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes. 'He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinons, or your hair has turned like his. 'There are no more facts about him -- that part is over. Now is the time for essential things...Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son. 'You'll live astride the line that separates life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them; you'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgment falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.

It's just one more thing she hadn't considered, and as the idea of it settles over her, she realizes again how entwined their lives are. They're like two trees whose branches have grown together. Even if you pull them out by the trunks, they're still going to be twisted and tangled and nearly impossible to separate at the roots.

A series of books, dilapidated and faded, sit bundled together. Most of the bindings are separating from the yellowed pages, but each is at home in its battered state. Their wrinkled pages and discolored skin tell not of old age, but of a good life. These books, unlike so many others, were not just read, but revisited, loved, and experienced.

Then what is true love?” she asked audaciously. Derian leaned forward, his focus powerfully set on her. His voice turned delicate and compelling as he spoke. “Love is so much more than an emotion. True love, Eena, is something that develops over time. It’s not the initial infatuation nor the shivers and butterflies that take your breath away when you’re first attracted to someone. Those things are nice, but they are barely the beginning of what could become true love. The emotions you speak of are temporary and unreliable, elicited when two people come together. The power I speak of grows ever stronger over time until it is steadfast, even in separation. Then, reunited, it solidifies unshakably.” She shook her head. “I don’t quite follow.” The captain inched closer, fixing her with the sincerest of gazes. His hands cupped as if he were holding his very heart in them. “True love is a developed and intense appreciation for someone. It’s that perfect awareness you’re finally whole when she’s with you, and that hollow incompleteness you suffer when she’s gone. True love takes time. It’s an earned comfort that tells you she’ll be right there beside you no matter what you do, not necessarily happy with your every action, but faithful to you just the same. Love is knowing someone so deeply, understanding her so completely, you can finish her thoughts without hesitation, confident in reading her face, her body, even her slightest gesture means something to you. Love is years of devotion, sacrifice, commitment, loyalty, trust, faith, and friendship all wrapped up as one. True love does more than cause your heart to flutter. It upholds your heart when the infatuation no longer makes it flutter.” “Wow.

When I was younger, I craved friendship and closeness. I make bonds without acknowledging how quickly and permanently they would break. I took people lives' personally. I felt their friends could be my friends, their parents could be their parents. But after awhile, I had to stop. It was too heartbreaking to live with too many separations.

Feminist psychologists have suggested that a toxic friendship is often one in which a women's own personal growth and individuation is sacrificed at the expense of the demands of the other person. Sometimes choosing oneself rather than the friendship is important for future personal growth and individuation. But women have a difficult time separating from each other because emotional connection is so highly valued and broken friendships are seen as failures.

She's come to realize that life is a bit like doing laundry--you have to separate the darks from the lights. One's not necessarily better than the other--they're just different. They have different needs, require different levels of care. She knows plenty of customers who don't give it much thought and throw all their laundry in together, and maybe that's the chaotic part of life that just happens, that no matter how hard you try, you can't always keep things separate. A red sock gets mixed in with a load of whites, or a delicate black top gets washed in hot water by accident. These things happen. All you can do is learn from it and move on. Tell your husband to enjoy his pink underwear, give your shrunken top to your little sister or niece. But it doesn't mean that you stop sorting your laundry. You keep sorting--lights from darks, darks from lights--and hope for the best.

Simon could hardly explain that he had attacked Sidney because he was too scared to attack Barry Spence.

We can only stop our watches, but not real time itself.

Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends’ secret places.

If only I had truly taken advantage of the situation, seized and held and prized the multitudes of advantages the summer offered me; if only I had.

Withdraw from talking about leaving someone behind. Just rekindle the friendship and love while you still have that moment together.

They're not lonely. There's two of them. When a wolf is howling at the moon, it's not actually because it's lonely. It's sort of a location technique, for when members of the pack get separated and they need to find one another. The first one saying, I'm here! I'm here! And then the other one says, Me too! Me too!

There I often walked along the shore, listened to the sea, and thought as I had done in my youth, with amazement and horror, about the sad and senseless confusion of life, that one could love in vain, that people who meant well toward each other should work out their destinies separately, each one going his own inexplicable way, and how each would like to help and draw close to the other and yet was unable to do so, as in troubled meaningless dreams.

We Are Lovable Even if the most important person in your world rejects you, you are still real, and you are still okay. —Codependent No More Do you ever find yourself thinking: How could anyone possibly love me? For many of us, this is a deeply ingrained belief that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thinking we are unlovable can sabotage our relationships with co-workers, friends, family members, and other loved ones. This belief can cause us to choose, or stay in, relationships that are less than we deserve because we don’t believe we deserve better. We may become desperate and cling as if a particular person was our last chance at love. We may become defensive and push people away. We may withdraw or constantly overreact. While growing up, many of us did not receive the unconditional love we deserved. Many of us were abandoned or neglected by important people in our life. We may have concluded that the reason we weren’t loved was because we were unlovable. Blaming ourselves is an understandable reaction, but an inappropriate one. If others couldn’t love us, or love us in ways that worked, that’s not our fault. In recovery, we’re learning to separate ourselves from the behavior of others. And we’re learning to take responsibility for our healing, regardless of the people around us. Just as we may have believed that we’re unlovable, we can become skilled at practicing the belief that we are lovable. This new belief will improve the quality of our relationships. It will improve our most important relationship: our relationship with our self. We will be able to let others love us and become open to the love and friendship we deserve. Today, help me be aware of and release any self-defeating beliefs I have about being unlovable. Help me begin, today, to tell myself that I am lovable. Help me practice this belief until it gets into my core and manifests itself in my relationships.

Two features in his personality make-up stand out as particularly pathological. The first is his ‘paranoid’ orientation toward the world. He is suspicious and distrustful of others, tends to feel that others discriminate against him, and feels that others are unfair to him and do not understand him. He is overly sensitive to criticism that others make of him, and cannot tolerate being made fun of. He is quick to sense slight or insult in things others say, and frequently may misinterpret well-meant communications. He feels the great need of friendship and understanding, but he is reluctant to confide in others, and when he does, expects to be misunderstood or even betrayed. In evaluating the intentions and feelings of others, his ability to separate the real situation from his own mental projections is very poor. He not infrequently groups all people together as being hypocritical, hostile, and deserving of whatever he is able to do to them. Akin to this first trait is the second, an ever -present, poorly controlled rage--- easily triggered by any feelings of being tricked, slighted, or labeled inferior by others. For the most part, his rages in the past have been directed at authority figures (297).

He had wished me well in finding my own fate to follow, and I never doubted his sincerity. But it had taken me years to accept that his absence in my life was a deliberate finality, an act he had chosen, a thing completed even as some part of my soul still dangled, waiting for his return. That, I think, is the shock of any relationship ending. It is realizing that what is still an ongoing relationship to someone is, for the other person, something finished and done with.

Everything is made of words, and the words had done their job. I could even say they had done it well. They had risen in a confusing swarm and spun around in spirals, ever higher, colliding and separating, golden insects, messengers of friendship and knowledge, higher, higher, into that region of the sky where the day turns into night and reality into dreams, regal words on their nuptial flight, always higher, until their marriage is finally consummated at the summit of the world.

The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism. It did not separate what belongs together. The Celtic imagination articulates the inner friendship that embraces Nature, divinity, underworld, and human world as one.

We're the Septembers now. The real ones. We are everything to one another. We don't need to say so; it's just true. Sometimes it seems like we're so close we form one single complete person rather than four separate ones. We settle into types- Bridget the athlete, Lena the beauty, Tibby the rebel, and me, Carmen, the...what? The one with the bad temper. But the one who cares the most. The one who cares that we stick together.

I’ve watched it time and time again—a woman always slots into a man’s life better than he slots into hers. She will be the one who spends the most time at his flat, she will be the one who makes friends with all his friends and their girlfriends. She will be the one who sends his mother a bunch of flowers on her birthday. Women don’t like this rigmarole any more than men do, but they’re better at it—they just get on with it. This means that when a woman my age falls in love with a man, the list of priorities goes from this: Family Friends To this: Family Boyfriend Boyfriend’s family Boyfriend’s friends Girlfriends of the boyfriend’s friends Friends Which means, on average, you go from seeing your friend every weekend to once every six weekends. She becomes a baton and you’re the one at the very end of the track. You get your go for, say, your birthday or a brunch, then you have to pass her back round to the boyfriend to start the long, boring rotation again. These gaps in each other’s lives slowly but surely form a gap in the middle of your friendship. The love is still there, but the familiarity is not. Before you know it, you’re not living life together anymore. You’re living life separately with respective boyfriends then meeting up for dinner every six weekends to tell each other what living is like. I now understand why our mums cleaned the house before their best friend came round and asked them “What’s the news, then?” in a jolly, stilted way. I get how that happens. So don’t tell me when you move in with your boyfriend that nothing will change. There will be no road trip. The cycle works when it comes to holidays as well—I’ll get my buddy back for every sixth summer, unless she has a baby in which case I’ll get my road trip in eighteen years’ time. It never stops happening. Everything will change.

16 Over the footbridge.— In our relations with people who are bashful about their feelings, we must be capable of dissimulation; they feel a sudden hatred against anyone who catches them in a tender, enthusiastic, or elevated feeling, as if he had seen their secrets. If you want to make them feel good at such moments, you have to make them laugh or voice some cold but witty sarcasm; then their feeling freezes and they regain power over themselves. But I am giving you the moral before telling the story. There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us. Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you: “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” —Immediately, you did not want to any more; and when I asked you again, you remained silent. Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.

That's why friendships that last a long period of time are quite special. You both grow and change over the years but somehow don't outgrow each other. These types of friendships are hard to keep going because once you stop going to school together, you get different jobs or live in entirely separate parts of the country. Friendships shouldn't really take that much effort. They should be effortless most of the time. Life is stressful enough as it is.

...but most of all he liked to listen to stories of real life. He smiled gleefully as he listened to such stories, putting in words and asking questions, all aiming at bringing out clearly the moral beauty of the action of which he was told. Attachments, friendships, love, as Pierre understood them, Karataev had none, but he loved and lived on affectionate terms with every creature with whom he was thrown in life, and especially so with man- not with any particular man, but with the men that happened to be before his eyes. But his life, as he looked at it, had no meaning as a separate life. It only had meaning as part of a whole, of which he was at all times conscious.

Let us love this distance which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated

Friendship often grows out of shared experiences

You didn’t grow apart because you’re evil, but because you evolved.

Elevation requires separation and if you are not willing to let go of certain people you will never rise to your rightful position.

Soon there will be distance between us. Let us love this distance that is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other cannot be separated.

We take it for granted that life moves forward. You build memories; you build momentum.You move as a rower moves: facing backwards. You can see where you've been, but not where you’re going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It's hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way. Avenoir. You'd see your memories approaching for years, and watch as they slowly become real. You’d know which friendships will last, which days are important, and prepare for upcoming mistakes. You'd go to school, and learn to forget. One by one you'd patch things up with old friends, enjoying one last conversation before you meet and go your separate ways. And then your life would expand into epic drama. The colors would get sharper, the world would feel bigger. You'd become nothing other than yourself, reveling in your own weirdness. You'd fall out of old habits until you could picture yourself becoming almost anything. Your family would drift slowly together, finding each other again. You wouldn't have to wonder how much time you had left with people, or how their lives would turn out. You'd know from the start which week was the happiest you’ll ever be, so you could relive it again and again. You'd remember what home feels like, and decide to move there for good. You'd grow smaller as the years pass, as if trying to give away everything you had before leaving. You'd try everything one last time, until it all felt new again. And then the world would finally earn your trust, until you’d think nothing of jumping freely into things, into the arms of other people. You'd start to notice that each summer feels longer than the last. Until you reach the long coasting retirement of childhood. You'd become generous, and give everything back. Pretty soon you’d run out of things to give, things to say, things to see. By then you'll have found someone perfect; and she'll become your world. And you will have left this world just as you found it. Nothing left to remember, nothing left to regret, with your whole life laid out in front of you, and your whole life left behind.

We have time for everything: to sleep, to run from one place to another, to regret having mistaken and to mistake again, to judge the others and to forgive ourselves we have time for reading and writing, for making corrections to our texts, to regret ever having written we have time to make plans and time not to respect them, we have time for ambitions and sicknesses, time to blame the destiny and the details, we have time to watch the clouds, advertisements or some ordinary accident, we have time to chase our wonders away and to postpone the answers, we have time to break a dream to pieces and then to reinvent it, we have time to make friends, to lose friends, we have time to receive lessons and forget them afterwards, we have time to receive gifts and not to understand them. We have time for them all. There is no time for just a bit of tenderness. When we are aware about to do this we die. I’ve learned that you cannot make someone love you; All you can do is to be a loved person. the rest … depends on the others. I’ve learned that as much as I care others might not care. I’ve learned that it takes years to earn trust and just a few seconds to lose it. I’ve learned that it does not matter WHAT you have in your life but WHO you have. I’ve learned that your charm is useful for about 15 minutes Afterwards, you should better know something. I’ve learned that no matter how you cut it, everything has two sides! I’ve learned that you should separate from your loved ones with warm words It might be the last time you see them! I’ve learned that you can still continue for a long time after saying you cannot continue anymore I’ve learned that heroes are those who do what they have to do, when they have to do it, regardless the consequences I’ve learned that there are people who love But do not know how to show it ! I’ve learned that when I am upset I have the RIGHT to be upset But not the right to be bad! I’ve learned that real friendship continues to exist despite the distance And this is true also for REAL LOVE !!! I’ve learned that if someone does not love you like you want them to It does not mean that they do not love you with all their heart. I’ve learned that no matter how good of a friend someone is for you that person will hurt you every now and then and that you have to forgive him. I’ve learned that it is not enough to be forgiven by others Sometimes you have to learn to forgive yourself. I’ve learned that no matter how much you suffer, The world will not stop for your pain. I’ve learned that the past and the circumstances might have an influence on your personality But that YOU are responsible for what you become !!! I’ve learned that if two people have an argument it does not mean that they do not love each other I’ve learned that sometimes you have to put on the first place the person, not the facts I’ve learned that two people can look at the same thing and can see something totally different I’ve learned that regardless the consequences those WHO ARE HONEST with themselves go further in life. I’ve learned that life can be changed in a few hours by people who do not even know you. I’ve learned that even when you think there is nothing more you can give when a friend calls you, you will find the strength to help him. I’ve learned that writing just like talking can ease the pains of the soul ! I’ve learned that those whom you love the most are taken away from you too soon … I’ve learned that it is too difficult to realise where to draw the line between being friendly, not hurting people and supporting your oppinions. I’ve learned to love to be loved.

Around this time, Pelletier and Espinoza, worried about the current state of their mutual lover, had two long conversations on the phone. The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word 'fate' used ten times and the word 'friendship' twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word 'Paris' was said seven times, 'Madrid', eight. The word 'love' was spoken twice, once by each man. The word 'horror' was spoken six times and the word 'happiness' once (by Espinoza). The word 'solution' was said twelve times. The word 'solipsism' once (Pelletier). The word 'euphemism' ten times. The word 'category', in the singular and plural, nine times. The word 'structuralism' once (Pelletier). The term 'American literature' three times. The word 'dinner' or 'eating' or 'breakfast' or 'sandwich' nineteen times. The word 'eyes' or 'hands' or 'hair' fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly. Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed. In fact, they both laughed, wrapped up in the waves of whatever it was that linked their voices and ears across the dark fields and the windows and the snow of the Pyrenees and the rivers and lonely roads and the separate and interminable suburbs surrounding Paris and Madrid.

In every one of your relationships, you are on a continuum between intimacy and separation. You stand on a slide that tilts you toward either intimacy or separateness. Exactly where you stand at any given moment is the result of your decisions, your feelings, how you handle situations, and the way you and the other person communicate.

True friends are like our favorite books on a shelf in our home that we look at everyday and continue to read over and over till we learn all we can about them. We never get rid of them, we just keep them to share and cherish our whole life. Some we share with many people but there are those that become our exclusive favorites that we keep in a small group, separated from all the others to learn from and enjoy forever ! Original quote form Doug Prentice

Money had replaced community mental healthcare the way medication had replaced state hospitals. Medication did not go looking for those who resisted taking it, and money could not administer itself. Neither came with counseling or support. The SSI checks Michael received, and the Medicaid requirements he was eligible for, did not create a caring community or even an indifferent one. Nevertheless, checks and pills were what remained of a grand promise, the ingredients of a mental healthcare system that had never been baked but were handed out like flour and yeast in separate packets to starving people.

Well--to put it briefly--Arianna and I had become--well--friends." "I see." "Nothing improper, you understand," Lelldorin said quickly. "But our friendship was such that--well--we didn't want to be separated." The young Asturian's face appealed to his friend for understanding. "Actually," he went on, "it was a little more than 'didn't want to.' Arianna told me she'd die if I left her behind." "Possibly she was exaggerating," Garion suggested. "How could I risk it, though?" Lelldorin protested. "Women are much more delicate than we are-- besides, Arianna's a physician. She'd know if she'd die, wouldn't she?

Sixth grade, I remembermy best friend Wendy whose parents were fighting, harshly, loudly, and we sat on the curb outside so she wouldn't have to hear it, and she cried, believing her world was falling apart. I made up a kind-of game: to everything she would say, I would respond 'Is that a fact or an opinion?' and she had to figure it out and say it outloud-- we played it for hours, ending up laughing but she also began to separate what was actually happening inside the house from her feelings about it and her fears. I feel like I'm still playing 'Fact or Opinion' in my writing, in the world-- with family, friends, and, of course, myself. Wish I could play it with our governmental representatives, our institutions, our courts.

Sixth grade, I remembermy best friend Wendy whose parents were fighting, harshly, loudly, and we sat on the curb outside so she wouldn't have to hear it, and she cried, believing her world was falling apart. I made up a kind-of game: to everything she would say, I would respond "Is that a fact or an opinion?" and she had to figure it out and say it outloud-- we played it for hours, ending up laughing but she also began to separate what was actually happening inside the house from her feelings about it and her fears. I feel like I'm still playing "Fact or Opinion" in my writing, in the world-- with family, friends, and, of course, myself. Wish I could play it with our governmental representatives, our institutions, our courts.

Principles of Liberty 1. The only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is Natural Law. 2. A free people cannot survive under a republican constitution unless they remain virtuous and morally strong. 3. The most promising method of securing a virtuous and morally strong people is to elect virtuous leaders. 4. Without religion the government of a free people cannot be maintained. 5. All things were created by God, therefore upon him all mankind are equally dependent, and to Him they are equally responsible. 6. All men are created equal. 7. The proper role of government is to protect equal rights, not provide equal things. 8. Men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. 9. To protect man's rights, God has revealed certain principles of divine law. 10. The God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people. 11. The majority of the people may alter or abolish a government which has become tyrannical. 12. The United States of America shall be a republic. 13. A constitution should be structured to permanently protect the people from the human frailties of their rulers. 14. Life and Liberty are secure only so long as the Igor of property is secure. 15. The highest level of securitiy occurs when there is a free market economy and a minimum of government regulations. 16. The government should be separated into three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. 17. A system of checks and balances should be adopted to prevent the abuse of power. 18. The unalienable rights of the people are most likely to be preserved if the principles of government are set forth in a written constitution. 19. Only limited and carefully defined powers should be delegated to the government, all others being retained by the people. 20. Efficiency and dispatch require government to operate according to the will of the majority, but constitutional provisions must be made to protect the rights of the minority. 21. Strong human government is the keystone to preserving human freedom. 22. A free people should be governed by law and not by the whims of men. 23. A free society cannot survive a republic without a broad program of general education. 24. A free people will not survive unless they stay strong. 25. "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none." 26. The core unit which determines the strength of any society is the family; therefore, the government should foster and protect its integrity. 27. The burden of debt is as destructive to freedom as subjugation by conquest. 28. The United States has a manifest destiny to be an example and a blessing to the entire human race.

Long time friends have a way of touching and impacting our lives in ways never imagined. As we all try to find our own place in this ever changing world, it’s comforting to know, that even though separated by time, distance or circumstance, what remains constant is an unspoiled bond of love and loyalty that can be depended upon for a lifetime. One of God’s most special gifts…is friendship.

And it is in New York I have those strangest things of all: human friendships. Not many friendships and not of spent familiarities: for I don't like actual human beings too much around me. But yet friendships made of the edges of thoughts and vivid pathos and pregnant odds and ends of nervous human flesh and fire. It is in New York I go to the apartment of a Friend at the end of an afternoon. In the apartment are some persons having tea, men and women. The Friend greets me at the door. She wears maybe a dress of thin dark and light silk, shaped in the quaint outlandish fashion of the hour. And she has shrewd kindly eyes like a Rembrandt portrait, and a worn New-York-ish Latin-ish brain and heart both of which are made of steel, sparkle and the very plain red meat of living. She says, 'Hello-Mary-Mac-Lane,' and clasps my hand, and we exchange a glance of no real understanding at all but suggesting warmed challenge of personality, and an oblique sweet call of depth to depth, and of friendship which by mere force of preference and of our separate quality and calibre is true rather than false. So close and no closer may friendship be. And friendship with-all, is closer than any love. It is the closest human beings ever come to meeting.

The walls we have to tear down to make room for each other are rarely physical. The walls that separate us are mostly psychological. Feelings are what exclude people from our friendship and dinner table: ignoring versus noticing, suspicion versus trust, exclusion versus embrace.

Once again I had the desolating sense of having all along ignored what was finest in him. Perhaps it was just the incongruity of seeing him aloft and stricken, since he was by nature someone who carried others. I didn't think he knew how to act or even how to feel as the object of help.

I love you and adore you and cherish you, with my dying heart, with my fleeting mind, and I wish you the absolute best in joy and harmony. The darkness is so grand, so hungry and so enormous, that it is a sin to fill it with anything but friendship. For we are many, and yet we are one, and no division, no barrier, no wall of any sort can separate us, can tear asunder the commonality that allows us to shower beautiful sparks into the black pits of desolation.

She peels an orange, separates it in perfect halves, and gives one of them to me. If I could wear it like a friendship bracelet, I would. Instead I swallow it section by section and tell myself it means even more this way. To chew and to swallow in silence with her. To taste the same thing in the same moment.

Idyllic is how Kundera describes human relationships with animals. Idyllic because animals were not expelled with us from Paradise. There they remain, untroubled by such complications as the separation of body and soul, and it's through our love and friendship with them that we are able to reconnect to Paradise, albeit by just a thread.

Let me, however, although no verbal critic, protest against the profanation of the word friend. In this my history I must be honest, make a distinction between the oriental diamond and its worthless imitation of paste, and separate the grain from the chaff — gossamer words, that weigh nothing, from substantial realities heavier than gold.

Just as soon as I meet and learn to love a friend we must part and go our separate ways, never to meet on quite the same ground again. For, disguise the fact as we will, when friends, even the closest-and perhaps the more so on account of that very closeness-meet again after a separation there is always a chill, lesser or greater, of change. Neither finds the other quite the same. This is only natural. Human nature is ever growing or retrograding-never stationary. But still, with all our philosophy who of us can repress a little feeling of bewildered disappointment when we realize that our friend is not and never can be just the same as before-even although the change may be an improvement?

This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but that they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pigmies while you were looking the other way.

Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.

You can't expect to rule anyone with the memorised laws inside your head, but you must adapt your attitude according to the time in which you are currently living in.

For humans, dead or alive, change cannot be avoided.

Those who focus too much on respect might end up being talkative and flattering in the near future.

When a child believes there is something wrong with them due to criticism, expectations, or judgements, they turn against themselves and experience the ultimate separation.

Silence is useful if you are an initiate and know what you are doing. But useless if there is no goal behind. It's a natural thing.

They each served a purpose in the other's life, and separately, each had enough to grieve without grieving each other as well.

This was why he liked me so much. When I jumped on top of him, my knees on his chest, he couldn't ask for anything better.

Phineas had thought of me as an extension of himself.

For it was friendship that had grown here, even in war. True friendship, to last beyond the oceans that would separate them once more.

I hope all you wish for comes to you, And you become who you're hoping to be. I know you will prosper in all you do, So promise you'll remember me.

Friendship and duty are two separate things,” he said, “and I put duty first. You are another generation, you wouldn’t understand.

The part of something is missing and the remaining part is itself not able to explain what part is missing.

Very intimate but very separate at the same time'. That's my credo for friendship.

Sadly, the hearts glued by friendship are often separated by love.

It’s such a disaster whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away at the wall of separation between friendship and kissing.

And through times of separation and trial, we learn the value of friendship and trust.

I also like to think that after the slight shock of separation you will not feel any sorrow … and that if you should sometimes happen to think of me you will do so as one thinks of a book one read in childhood. I do not want ever to occupy a different place from that in the hearts of those I love, because then I can be sure of never causing them any unhappiness.

Maybe in some relationships there was so much history that fondness and guilt and curiosity and familiarity remained separate elements and could never be melted down into friendship.

Faced with a divorce or separation, faced with the need to terminate a long-standing friendship, I must remind myself that sometimes the most loving involvement is a non-involvement.

do you love her" Wulfgar asked suddenly, and the drow was off his guard. "Of course I do," Drizzt responded truthfully. "As I love you, and Bruenor, and Regis." "I would not interfere-" Wulfgar started to say, but he was stopped by Drizzt's chuckle. "The choice is neither mine nor yours," the drow explained, "but Catti-brie's. Remember, what you had, my friend, and remember what you, in your foolishness, nearly lost." Wulfgar looked long and hard at his dear friend, determined to heed that wise advice. Catti-brie's life was Catti-brie's to decide and whatever, or whomever, she chose, Wulfgar would always be among friends. The winter would be long and cold, thick with snow and mercifully uneventful. Things would not be the same between the friends, could never be after all they had experienced, but they would be together again, in heart and in soul. Let no man, and no fiend, ever try to separate them again!

Yes, there had been increasing distance between you and me--there always is between people who have been friends from a young age as each grows into her own self, which might be a self that neither anticipated on those warm summer nights when they had pledged their undying friendship to one another, staring up at millions of stars, each representing a possible future.

And though our relationship had many layers, they weren’t separate. Like my feelings for him weren’t kept in a neat little box beside the one where our friendship was. We swirled together. Like chocolate and vanilla soft serve, like ketchup and mustard on a burger. Our friendship was better because of our love. Our love was better because it blossomed out of friendship.

Always maintain a separate life that includes hobbies, healthy friendships, some adventures, and self-care while in a relationship. This will make your love connection much more fulfilling.

Branding is a process that requires what the author and psychotherapist Nancy Colier describes as an imperative to “relate to our self in the third person.” A commodified self may be rich, but commodification still requires a partitioning, an internal doubling that is inherently alienating. There is you, and then there is Brand You. As much as we might like to believe that these selves can be kept separate, brands are hungry, demanding things, and one self necessarily impacts the other. If countless numbers of us are doubled, all partitioning and performing ourselves, it becomes harder for anyone to know what is real and what and who can be trusted. Which of our opinions are genuine, and which are for show? Which friendships are rooted in love, and which are co-branding collabs? What collaborations don’t happen that should because individuals’ brands are pitted against one another? What doesn’t ever get said, or shared, because it’s off-brand?

This is how you keep a best friend: you talk out of guilt, you live in separate states. Again and again, you vow fidelity to her in fits of absurd hopefulness. It is the same as being in love.

I had to be right in never talking about what you could not change, and I had to make many people agree that I was right. None of them ever accused me of being responsible for what had happened to Phineas, either because they could not believe it or because they could not understand it. I would have talked about that, but they would not, and I would not talk about Phineas in any other way.

Only God can cool the heat—separate the tea back from the water. Sometimes he even puts other people near the heat. People who can endure it. People equipped to help that person regain hope again.” It

People come and go, and even the closest members of the family eventually disperse. It’s useless to cling to anybody or anything because everything in the universe tends toward separation, chaos, and entropy, not cohesion. I have chosen a simpler life, with fewer material things and more leisure, fewer worries and more fun, fewer social commitments and more true friendship, less fuss and more silence.

Nevertheless now have I asked thee but only of the fire and wind, and of the day where-through thou hast passed, and of things from which thou canst not be separated, and yet canst thou give me no answer of them.

It wasn't the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had town from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace.

Those who hate to be socially involved, they are in love with their loneliness and those who feel alone in their company are the true lovers of social acceptance. Either way, life must be balanced between love and hate.

That drawing closer together of two solitary people of the same blood was far from friendship, but it did allow them both to bear up better under the unfathomable solitude that separated and united them at the same time.

It is a pleasant reflexion that friends who are too far separated for personal intercourse, have the means of communicating thoughts & feelings by pen and paper.' --ELIZABETH CARRINGTON MORRIS, Letter to Ann Haines, June 3, 1840.

When we can see our partner as not separate from us, not better or worse or even equal to ourselves, then we have the wisdom of nondiscrimination. We see the happiness of others as our happiness, their suffering as our suffering.

Although Gora had tried his best to dissuade Anandamoyi from attending Binoy's marriage ceremony he was not in his heart of hearts very much pained when, taking no account of his anger or distress, she refused to listen to him, in fact he really felt delighted. Feeling so certain that however great the gulf between Binoy and himself might become, Binoy could be never deprived of that part of his mother's immeasurable love which was showered upon him like nectar, Gora's heart was satisfied and at peace. From every other standpoint he might be separated ever so far from Binoy, but by this one bond of imperishable love of a mother these two lifelong friends would be united by the closest and deepest ties for life.

We’ve made it private, contained it in family, when its audacity is in its potential to cross tribal lines. We’ve fetishized it as romance, when its true measure is a quality of sustained, practical care. We’ve lived it as a feeling, when it is a way of being. It is the elemental experience we all desire and seek, most of our days, to give and receive. The sliver of love’s potential that the Greeks separated out as eros is where we load so much of our desire, center so much of our imagination about delight and despair, define so much of our sense of completion. There is the love the Greeks called filia—the love of friendship. There is the love they called agape—love as embodied compassion, expressions of kindness that might be given to a neighbor or a stranger. The Metta of the root Buddhist Pali tongue, “lovingkindness,” carries the nuance of benevolent, active interest in others known and unknown, and its cultivation begins with compassion towards oneself.

I am not separate from you, my neighbour. If you are my enemy then I am my own enemy. If you are my friend then I am my own friend. Today, I have stripped off my masks and come to know myself. I am Christian. I am Jew. I am Muslim and Hindu. I am European and African. Asian and South American. I am man. I am woman. I am intersexed. I am homosexual. I am heterosexual and asexual. I am abled. I am disabled. I am all these things because you are, and you are all these things because we are. I exist in relation to each of you, this is what gives my being meaning. Why must I label myself like a bottle of wine? When I am the bottle, the wine, and the drunkenness. Why must I label myself at all? When I am the flesh, the light, and the shadow. When I am the voice, the song, and the echo. Tell me why I must label myself when I am the lover, the beloved, and love. I am not separate from you, my neighbour. And you are not separate from humanity. We are all mirrors, reflecting one another in perpetuity.

We are acknowledging the interconnectedness of our lives with other animals. Their well-being is not separate from ours. On the contrary, we share the same fate. Moving forward, how we choose to be with animals will depend on how willing we are to be with them. Not as predator and prey, not as master and servant. But as kin, as partners, and as friends, strolling shoulder to shoulder along the dips and rises that stretch before us. We lose nothing when we do so. What we gain is our health, our happiness, our humanity. And friendships that are irreplaceable.

My views in my early 20’s and kept me separate from those around me. Those views were all about making myself feel significant by bringing other people down. I thought having special problems made me special. Problems don’t make people special. Solving them does. My views created an Us-vs-Them perspective of the world. Solving my problem required finding more Us people and to avoid Them. I wanted a special club of Us people. The problem was that all the Us people I found thought that their problems were more unique than the other Us people. We never bonded. We were still separating ourselves by one-upping each other about the uniqueness of our problems. The upside to Us-Vs-Them is that we feel special being Us. Unfortunately feeling special doesn’t outweigh the significant downside. There will always be more Them than Us There has to be. Otherwise, the exclusively club of Us wouldn’t be exclusive. So to maintain the exclusivity, we make more rules in our head to keep others out. We become more dependent on less people and are devastated when those people don’t reciprocate by valuing our friendship with the same mindfulness. Finding more people to connect with seems beyond our control because we automatically put everyone in the Them column and wait for people to work their way into the Us column. The problem is no one wants to have to prove themselves in order to become friends. We end up waiting and waiting.

Danger in Denial How have we come so quickly to forget the lessons we were forced to learn together. Why have we subjugated our memory in the vain hope that we will be able to live above and beyond history? When will we cease presiding over the mutilation of memory? I prefer the remembrance, the painful bitter recall. I know that I need a brother who shares this tender, taunting heritage. True friendship. I desire a sister who is not in denial of our mutual past. Together we may be able to plan a less painful future. Separate, we can only anticipate further ruptures and grotesque loneliness.

I used to imagine life divided into separate compartments, consisting, for example, of such dual abstractions as pleasure and pain, love and hate, friendship and enmity; and more material classifications like work and play: a profession or calling being, according to that concept—one that seemed, at least on the surface, unequivocally assumed by persons so dissimilar from one another as Widmerpool and Archie Gilbert, something entirely different from “spare time.” That illusion, as such a point of view was, in due course, to appear—was closely related to another belief: that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments. As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; so that, at last, diversity between them, if in truth existent, seems to be almost imperceptible except in a few crude and exterior ways: unthinkable, as formerly appeared, any single consummation of cause and effect. In other words, nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out at last to be tenaciously inter-related; love and hate, friendship and enmity, too, becoming themselves much less clearly defined, more often than not showing signs of possessing characteristics that could claim, to say the least, not a little in common; while work and play merge indistinguishably into a complex tissue of pleasure and tedium.

Some human happiness is a landlocked lake; but the Grancys’ was an open sea, stretching a buoyant and inimitable surface to the voyaging interests of life. There was room to spare on those waters for all our separate ventures; and always, beyond the sunset, a mirage of the fortunate isles toward which our prows were bent.

Genuine friendships are hard to come by and even harder to hold on to. Real friendship is the sort that lasts a lifetime. The type that can overcome disagreements and differences as if they never happened. And the real test of friendship? True friendship arises from the ashes of separation stronger and more powerful than before.

At the end of the night, I hug my boys and tell them I love them. The words come out easy and the hugs linger with the knowledge of not knowing when the next hug will be given. We punch each other's chests after hugs, lightly, before getting into our separate cabs or cars and speeding off toward a few hours of sleep before our separate airport trips. From the back of my car, underneath waves of glowing neon lights flooding into the windows, I think about how often me and the boys I knew and know were taught to love each other through expressions of violence. How, if that is our baseline for love, it might be impossible for us to love anyone well, including ourselves.

I learned that a stiff test for friendship is: “Would she be pleasant to have t.b. with?” Unfortunately, too many people, when you try separating them from their material possessions and any and all activity, turn out to be like cheap golf balls. You unwind and unwind and unwind but you never get to the pure rubber core because there isn’t any.

to, but I still find her just as beautiful. She peels an orange, separates it in perfect halves, and gives one of them to me. If I could wear it like a friendship bracelet, I would. Instead I swallow it section by section and tell myself it means even more this way. To chew and to swallow in silence here with her. To taste the same thing in the same moment.

It’s such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away at the wall of separation between friendship and kissing. Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have a happy middle ... And sometimes that happy middle looks so great that you can convince yourself that it’s not the middle but will last forever.

Every cell in her body was screaming at her to flee, but every beat of her heart was telling her to stay. And now she knew. She did belong to him, because he belonged to her, and they belonged to each other. There was no wedding vow that needed to be spoken for her to understand that. Even unmarried, even under separate roofs, they belonged together. No suitable wife would ever care for him more.

I didn't know why he had chosen me, why it was only to me that he could show the most humbling sides of his handicap. I didn't care. For the war was no longer eroding the peaceful summertime stillness I had prized so much at Devon, and although the playing fields were crusted under a foot of congealed snow and the river was now a hard gray-white lane of ice between gaunt trees, peace had come back to Devon for me.

Many marriages end up failing because the people that start into them over time become different people. What love had found as common ground, time separates into distinct territories. It’s inevitable. As intelligent beings we grow by changing. No one stays the same. The person you fall in love with will always be someone different ten years down the pike. The same was true for friendships. Even curious friendships like ours.

Under the influence not I know of the hardest cider but of his own inner joy at life for a moment as it should be, as it was meant to be in his nature, Phineas recaptured that magic gift for existing primarily in space, one foot conceding briefly to gravity its rights before spinning him off again into the air. it was his wildest demonstration of himself, of himself in the kind of world he loved; it was his choreography of peace.

Cian smiled a little, but it didn't reach those cool blue eyes. 'Whether it's by violence or nature, the result is the same. I've seen more death than you, more than you ever will. But still, you've seen more than most humans have or will. And that separates us, you and me, from the rest.' 'We don't have any choice about that.' 'Oh, of course we do. I know a bit about loneliness, and what can chase it back, even for the short run.

Why the difference? We are one! Yes, we are one! We are one because we breathe the same air no matter where we go! Just as the fingers lean on the same hand for survival, so are we! God knew why He created the fingers with spaces! We are one! Let us not harm ourselves just because you don’t understand me and I don’t understand you! Let us miss misunderstanding, and we shall surely see that understanding! We are one! Just as the fingers come together to feed the same stomach that gives the hand they all stand on strength, so are we! When it is time for work, some of the fingers are very active and some stay dormant, but they all receive the same nutrient from the body! When it is time for thumbs-up, the thumb rises for the approval and glory and all other fingers come together in support of it! All the fingers have their own unique function that is vital for the good functioning of the hand! Let one finger get hurt, and you shall see how the others would never be comfortable! We are separated for a purpose, and we are one for a purpose! The glory of the thick forest is not in how the trees stand alone when you have a closer view, but how it looks so beautiful like a canopy from a distance! The difference is in how we see it! The difference is in how we understand it! Hello, we are one! The love of God is for all!

People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly un-charted territory—whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the "fag hag" label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are -patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our-parents or schools or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends' tricks and tricks' bar friends and gal pals and companions "in the life," queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from many straight people. Who among us would give them up? Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room. (In some circles this is a common party sport already.) You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends.

Send for the doctor! I need a medicine man who will solder my body and soul together, which splits at every separation. The doctor says it is the flu. He cannot see the body is empty, the fire is gone, I am king without kingdom, and artist without a home, a stranger to luxury, to power, to bigness, to comfort. I lost a world, a small human world of love and friendship. I am not adventurer, I miss my home, familiar streets, those I love and know well.

Anyway, it will give me something to brew about. And there is still a Jerusalem story* to do, and that story about a husband and wife in Venice† that I told you I wanted to do, where the husband suddenly sees his wife passing in one of those vaporettos on the Grand Canal, and yet he knew he had seen her off to fly home to England that morning! I might get about six longish short stories, that would fit into a book, and be sold separately to Journal or Good Housekeeping, in America.

And they fortified Jerusalem unto the broad wall." Nehemiah 3:8 Cities well fortified have broad walls, and so had Jerusalem in her glory. The New Jerusalem must, in like manner, be surrounded and preserved by a broad wall of nonconformity to the world, and separation from its customs and spirit. The tendency of these days break down the holy barrier, and make the distinction between the church and the world merely nominal. Professors are no longer strict and Puritanical, questionable literature is read on all hands, frivolous pastimes are currently indulged, and a general laxity threatens to deprive the Lord's peculiar people of those sacred singularities which separate them from sinners. It will be an ill day for the church and the world when the proposed amalgamation shall be complete, and the sons of God and the daughters of men shall be as one: then shall another deluge of wrath be ushered in. Beloved reader, be it your aim in heart, in word, in dress, in action to maintain the broad wall, remembering that the friendship of this world is enmity against God.

It’s such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away at the wall of separation between friendship and kissing. Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have a happy middle—oh, look, we broke down this wall, I’m going to look at you like a girl and you’re going to look at me like a boy and we’re going to play a fun game called Can I Put My Hand There What About There What About There. And sometimes that happy middle looks so great that you can convince yourself that it’s not the middle but will last forever.

Each of us has a different life puzzle to assemble. The choices you make in the midst of your life journey do have eternal consequences. Yes, you can throw the pieces at God in anger and say, “I do not like the life You have given me, and I refuse to live within these limitations with a humble heart. You have made me a victim. You have ruined my life. I will choose to live in darkness.” If that is your choice, the puzzle of your life will remain fragmented and separated, with holes in the picture. However, if you choose to bow your knee and submit to the varied circumstances of your life, God will do miracles. If you choose to trust and develop your integrity and an inner standard of holiness that isn’t dependent on cultural standards, the puzzle pieces will begin to come together. No matter what your limitations are—health issues, financial problems, a difficult marriage or divorce, a loss of friendship, death of a dream—your life is meant to be filled to the brim with the potential of God’s blessings. But in order to thrive and heal, you must accept any limitations by faith, trust in His faithfulness each step of the way, and wait for His grace so you can live a faithful story right in the place you find yourself.

Living in the past is always a bad idea; yet, on some level I believe the ones we love, even though not part of our present, are the very definition of who we are, the driving force of what we aspire to be, and at the end of the day, the past we must look to in order to improve who we will become. After all, we do not learn from what has not happened, but what has been, and what we will choose to keep or leave behind. Friendship, true friendship is never blind, but it holds the value of forgiveness - separating what we may or may have not done within the realm of mistakes....seeking the outcome of making us into better people.

Our friendship gave us the sense of normalcy we’d been craving. It showed us that we could exist, that we could have friends, without the appearance of our faces impacting how we were treated. That not everyone would treat us poorly because of the way we looked. More than that, it taught us that we did not have to be defined by our faces. That we could separate ourselves from all we had been through. Their friendship also showed me the kind of life I wanted to have and the kind of person I wanted to be. When I was unsure of myself or nervous about meeting new people, I channeled who I was with them. I did not owe anyone an explanation for my face.

Three psychosocial achievements - a sense of self, the belief that we can have an impact on our circumstances, and the ability to regulate our emotions - allow us to handle challenges, setbacks, and disappointments. These attributes are the scaffolding upon which intimacy, meaning, and mental health are built. Ultimately, autonomy - being capable of both healthy separation and healthy connection - signals the successful completion of adolescent tasks. In almost all cultures, adolescence begins with a bold psychological move away from parents and ends with a mature return to the family relationship and an expanded repertoire of friendships and intimate relationships.

At the beginning of a full five-stage Tragedy, the central figure is always part of a community, a network of relationships, linked to other people by ties of loyalty, friendship, family or marriage. And one of the most important things which happens to such heroes and heroines as they embark on their tragic course is that they begin to break those bonds of loyalty, friendship and love (even if, initially, they may form other alliances). It is the very essence of Tragedy that the hero or heroine should become, step by step, separated from other people. Often they separate themselves in the most obvious, violent and final way possible, by causing other people's deaths.

After months of separation her friends still catalyzed her thoughts and challenged her opinions and wrangled with her emotions, and she was relieved to see that they still slid into the familiar patterns, the comfortable ruts of long-established personalities. It was nice but it also worried her. Could there be room for growth? How could you change around the people that knew you best, who knew you backwards and forwards and knew you so well that they defined themselves by you and you by them? How could you possibly evolve, like really evolve and become a whole person all on your own, when your own makeup was inextricably intertwined with someone else’s perception of themselves?

Romantic love has highs and lows and lots of rare emotions and dangerous sensations but it bores easily and has no friendship in it, and often when it's over, it is as if a tornado passed. It's a very expensive form of recreation, a theatre play with daydreams, a frolic of your own in which you are the main event. Human love is based in every day, not fantasies or illusions. It acknowledges the other person as a separate person and even loves them for their imperfections, for their vulnerabilities and their incompleteness, and allows them to change and to grow. It seeks to honour, not to use, to empower, not to overpower, and when it fails, it just gets cranky, it does not blow a fuse.

It is impossible to separate: heat and light, warmth and fire, joy and laughter, bliss and contentment, pleasure and elation, euphoria and excitement, faith and certainty, pride and destruction, hope and anticipation, desire and expection, love and affection, passion and devotion, misery and hatred, temper and violence, rage and resentment, lust and infatuation, sentiment and opinion, zeal and ambition, confidence and conviction, anger and bitterness, loyalty and friendship, joy and laughter, peace and calmness, patience and composure, truth and virtue, courage and fortitude, mercy and charity, service and honor, need and desire, life and activity, being and reality, and time and eternity.

I love reading. It has taught me many things. I have learned how to bridge the gap between both genders and age. Separation anxiety and psychoanalysing myself. Between youth and adulthood. It takes a lifetime for some people to fully grasp how wonderful it is just to accept the friendship of someone who is older than you or younger than you. You will always learn something new and that is always how the game of life is played. You do not have to be an intellectual to realise that this moment in time for any generation you will always be caught between pitching your tent, finding that perfect picnic spot, realising that you are perpetually caught between being the frosting on top of the cake and the Everest.

This is essential: the Christian ethic is not born from a system of commandments but is a consequence of our friendship with Christ. This friendship influences life; if it is true it incarnates and fulfills itself in love for neighbor. For this reason, any ethical decay is not limited to the individual sphere but it also weakens personal and communal faith from which it derives and on which it has a crucial effect. Therefore let us allow ourselves to be touched by reconciliation, which God has given us in Christ, by God’s “foolish” love for us; nothing and no one can ever separate us from his love (cf. Rom. 8:39). We live in this certainty. It is this certainty that gives us the strength to live concretely the faith that works in love.

Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries. 'Out of sight, out of mind,' is well enough as a proverb applicable to cases of friendship, though absence is not always necessary to hollowness of heart, even between friends, and truth and honesty, like precious stones, are perhaps most easily imitated at a distance, when the counterfeits often pass for real. Love, however, is very materially assisted by a warm and active imagination: which has a long memory, and will thrive, for a considerable time, on very slight and sparing food. Thus it is, that it often attains its most luxuriant growth in separation and under circumstances of the utmost difficulty.

When you confess your sin to another Christian...The expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all it's power...The sinner is no longer alone with his evil for he has cast off his sin in confession and handed it over to God. It has been taken away from him. Now he stands in the fellowship of sinners who live by the grace of God in the cross of Jesus Christ. Now he can be a sinner and still enjoy the grace of God. He can confess his sins and in his very act find fellowship for the first time. The sin concealed separated him from the fellowship, made all his apparent fellowship a sham; the sin confessed has helped him to find true fellowship with the brethren in Jesus Christ.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, life together

From my experience, I perceived Bill and Hillary to share a strong friendship and business relationship. Since I knew them both to be bisexual8, the media hyped ‘affairs’ could not be what they appeared. I called them a “perversion diversion” from the real crimes Bill and Hillary were guilty of. Hillary’s act as a jilted wife was a deliberate “division decision.” Knowing the Clintons and social engineering tactics, the illusion was created to separate her from Bill in the public eye so that she would eventually run for President as intended. Just as Bill went into the office of President as a “Democrat” to make the public feel they had a change from “Republicans” leading them into the New World Order, Hillary would be the illusion of change from male Presidents.

Dear Sawyer and Quin, If you ever read this and I'm gone I want you to know something that has been weighing on me. I watch you two play and it can be so sad sometimes. You two have been best friends since Sawyer's birth. Always inseparable. It's been adorable , but comes with its challenges. I'm worried when I watch you boys. Quinton, you are always driven by your ego. You're strong and talented, but much too determined to beat down everyone in your efforts to be the best. You push yourself to win a competition, then shove it in someone's face. I’ve rarely seen you compliment others, but you always give yourself a pat on the back. You don't play anything for the love of it, you play to win and normally do. I've seen you tear down your brother so many times just to feel good about yourself. You don't have to do that, dear. You don't have to spend your life trying to prove that you're amazing. One day you'll fail and be alone because you've climbed to the top of a pyramid with only enough room for yourself. Don't let it get to that point and if you do, learn humility from your brother. He could do without so much of it. Sawyer, just because you're most often the underdog and the peaceful introspective kid, don't think I'm letting you off the hook. Your humility has become your worst enemy. It's so intense that I wonder if it will be your vice one day, instead of your greatest virtue. It's one thing to believe you are below all men, even when you're not, but it's another thing to be crippled by fear and to no longer try. Sometimes , dear, I think you fear being good at something because you've tasted the bitterness of being the one who comes in last and you don't want to make others feel that way. That's sweet of you and I smile inside when I see you pretending to lose when you race your younger cousins , but if you always let people beat you they may never learn to work hard for something they want. It's okay to win, just win for the right reasons and always encourage those who lose. Oh, and Sawyer, I hope one day you read this. One day when it matters. If so, remember that the bottom of a mountain can be just as lonely as the top. I hope the two of you can learn to climb together one day. As I'm writing this you are trying to climb the big pine tree out back. Quin is at the top, rejoicing in his victory and taunting Sawyer. And Sawyer is at the bottom, afraid to get hurt and afraid to be sad about it. I'm going to go talk to you two separately now. I hope my words mean something. Love you boys, Mom

The third feature which is of importance for romantic subjectivity within its mundane sphere is fidelity. Yet by ‘fidelity’ we have here to understand neither the consistent adherence to an avowal of love once given nor the firmness of friendship of which, amongst the Greeks, Achilles and Patroclus, and still more intimately, Orestes and Pylades counted as the finest model. Friendship in this sense of the word has youth especially for its basis and period. Every man has to make his way through life for himself and to gain and maintain an actual position for himself. Now when individuals still live in actual relationships which are indefinite on both sides, this is the period, i.e. youth, in which individuals become intimate and are so closely bound into one disposition, will, and activity that, as a result, every undertaking of the one becomes the undertaking of the other. In the friendship of adults this is no longer the case. A man’s affairs go their own way independently and cannot be carried into effect in that firm community of mutual effort in which one man cannot achieve anything without someone else. Men find others and separate themselves from them again; their interests and occupations drift apart and are united again; friendship, spiritual depth of disposition, principles, and general trends of life remain, but this is not the friendship of youth, in the case of which no one decides anything or sets to work on anything without its immediately becoming the concern of his friend. It is inherent essentially in the principle of our deeper life that, on the whole, every man fends for himself, i.e. is himself competent to take his place in the world. Fidelity in friendship and love subsists only between equals.

If mind belongs to humans alone, then stones, trees, and streams become mere objects of human tinkering. We can plunder the earth's resources with impunity, treating creeks and mountaintops in Kentucky or rivers in India or forests in northwest America as if they existed only for economic development. Systems of land and river become inert chunks of lifeless mud or mechanical runs of H2O rather than the living, breathing bodies upon which we and all other creatures depend for our very lives. Not to mention what 'nature as machine' has done to our emotional and spiritual well-being. When we regard nature as churning its way forward mindlessly through time, we turn our backs on mystery, shunning the complexity as well as the delights of relationship. We isolate ourselves from the rest of the creatures with whom we share this world. We imagine ourselves the apex of creation -- a lonely spot indeed. Human minds become the measure of creation and human thoughts become the only ones that count. The result is a concept of mind shorn of its wild connections, in which feelings become irrelevant, daydreams are mere distractions, and nighttime dreams -- if we attend to them at all -- are but the cast-offs of yesterday's overactive brain. Mind is cut off from matter, untouched by exingencies of mud or leaf, shaped by whispers or gales of wind, as if we were not, like rocks, made of soil. And then we wonder at our sadness and depression, not realizing that our own view of reality has sunk us into an unbearable solipsism, an agony of separateness -- from loved ones, from other creatures, from rich but unruly emotions, in short, from our ability to connect, through senses and feeling and imagination, with the world that is our home.

There is always the risk: something is good and good and good and good, and then all at once it gets awkward. All at once, she sees you looking at her, and then she doesn't want to joke around with you anymore, because she doesn't want to seem flirty, because she doesn't want you to think she likes you. It's such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away at the wall of separation between friendship and kissing. Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have a happy middle - oh, look, we broke down this wall, I'm going to look at you like a girl and you're going to look at me like a boy and we're going to play a fun game called Can I Put My Hand There What About There What About There. And sometimes that happy middle looks so great that you can convince yourself that it's not the middle but will last forever.

What are we doing for supper tonight?” Avery asked, turning around in my desk chair and separating me from my memories. I grunted and tossed a package of ramen over my shoulder. She groaned. “Not again. Please. You need real food, Summer.” “Noodles are real food. They’re a relative to real pasta, which came from Italy and we know how kick-ass Italian food is. Boom. They’re gourmet badassness.” She tossed them to the corner. “They’re not, and I’m pulling my friendship card.” No way. She couldn’t. I rotated around in my chair to stare at her. “Not the friendship card.” “Totally the friendship card.” I pretended to gasp and shudder. Okay, I really did shudder. I’d never admit it, but the ramen wasn’t doing it for me either... "I was thinking we could go to a restaurant or something.” “What is this you speak of? A dwelling where they serve many varieties of solids?” Her lip twitched in a grin. “Yeah, that. You and me, we’re going to dress up, and we’re going to dine like queens.” “Can I wear a tiara?” “Without a doubt.” She winked at me as she got up and went to the door. “Thirty minutes, then we’re leaving.

It was an exquisite memorial to that than which the world offers but one thing more precious, to a friendship; and as Philip looked at it, he felt the tears come to his eyes. He thought of Hayward and his eager admiration for him when first they met, and how disillusion had come and then indifference, till nothing held them together but habit and old memories. It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary. Your life proceeded and you did not even miss him. Philip thought of those early days in Heidelberg when Hayward, capable of great things, had been full of enthusiasm for the future, and how, little by little, achieving nothing, he had resigned himself to failure. Now he was dead. His death had been as futile as his life. He died ingloriously, of a stupid disease, failing once more, even at the end, to accomplish anything. It was just the same now as if he had never lived.

That they were false, the general had learnt from the very person who had suggested them, from Thorpe himself, whom he had chanced to meet again in town, and who, under the influence of exactly opposite feelings, irritated by Catherine’s refusal, and yet more by the failure of a very recent endeavour to accomplish a reconciliation between Morland and Isabella, convinced that they were separated forever, and spurning a friendship which could be no longer serviceable, hastened to contradict all that he had said before to the advantage of the Morlands—confessed himself to have been totally mistaken in his opinion of their circumstances and character, misled by the rhodomontade of his friend to believe his father a man of substance and credit, whereas the transactions of the two or three last weeks proved him to be neither; for after coming eagerly forward on the first overture of a marriage between the families, with the most liberal proposals, he had, on being brought to the point by the shrewdness of the relator, been constrained to acknowledge himself incapable of giving the young people even a decent support. They

In 1643, the four separate colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth Plantation, Connecticut, and New Haven agreed to form an association known as the New England Confederation. This was the first attempt to unite several colonies in mutual cooperation. The governing document for that Confederation clearly stated the Christian nature of these early settlements: Whereas we all came into these parts of America with one and the same end and aim, namely, to advance the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel in purity and peace….The said United Colonies…[do] enter into a firm and perpetual league of friendship…for preserving and propagating the truth and liberties of the Gospel and for their own mutual safety and welfare.181 The New England Confederation was the first joint government in America, even having its own version of a Congress with elected representatives from each of the four colonies. It lasted until 1684, when Great Britain tried to force the separate colonies to become just one. The people eventually defeated that British plan and restored the independent sovereignty of each colony.

Where have you been?” I softly answered followed by a question. I wanted to laugh hysterically at the controlled calmness of it all, as if nothing at all had happened, as if he hadn’t resurrected himself after an eternity of absence. “New York,” I have a good friend there. I found a job, a place. I had to- away from here; away from Bella; from you.” Swallowing, I clasped my hands together to stop from trembling and I said in a low, audible voice, “From me?” He sighed heavily. “I can’t love you, Helena. I still love Bella. And I suppose I could love another woman in another way at the same time, but not you.” “…but why?” I tried hard to keep my voice and gaze even. I glanced at the plain wedding ring on the third finger on his left hand, his wedding band. It was gleaming brightly in the firelight. I felt my heart plummet, like a disappointed child. Seeking the right words, he replied with a very soft voice, “It’s because I would always see you as an extension of her. I want to fall in love with you in separate way, the one that involves only us, uninfluenced by the past and our hurt. I can’t do that now and I can’t tell when I’ll be able to.

Personality is what is based upon freedom - the first, deepest, innermost mode, but it is also the most abstract mode in which freedom announces its presence in the subject. E.g. ‘i am a person, i stand on my own.’ Therefore when each is a person, then through this definition of the person, what the idea demands appears to be made even more unattainable, namely to regard these distinctions as distinctions that are not distinct but absolutely one, attaining the sublation of the distinction. Two cannot be one; each is a rigid, independent being-for-self. Logic shows the category of the one is a poor category, the wholly abstract unit. If I say One of God, I must say this of everything else. But as far as personality is concerned, it is the character of the person, the subject, to surrender its isolation and separateness. Ethical life, love, means precisely the giving up of particularity, of particular personality, and its extension to universality - so too with friendship. In friendship and love, I give up my abstract personality and thereby win it back as concrete. The truth of personality is found precisely in winning it back through this immersion, this being immersed in the other.

We enrich ourselves with the consideration with which we load it. We do not believe we can separate our interest from that of humanity., that we can disparage the species without compromising ourselves. This ridiculous vanity has filled books with hymns in favor of Nature. With those who think, mankind is in disgrace. He is for whomever charges him with the least vice. When was he not on the verge of uplifting himself, of reinstating himself in virtue? Nothing is said. It is too soon since more than seven thousand years that there have been men. As for customs, as for all the rest, the least good is set on high. We have the advantage of working after the ancients, the wise men among the moderns. We are susceptible of friendship, justice, compassion, reason. O, my friend! What, then, is this absence of virtue? Inasmuch as my friends do not die, I shall not speak of death. To witness our relapses, to observe that our sorrows have been able to correct our faults, fills us with consternation. We can judge the beauty of death only by the beauty of life. The thee final points make me shrug my shoulders in pity. Is that necessary in order to prove that one is an intelligent man, in other words an imbecile? As if light were not as good as shadow, speaking of points!

What is so rewarding about friendship?” my son asked, curling his upper lip into a sour expression. “Making friends takes too much time and effort, and for what?” I sat on the edge of his bed, understanding how it might seem simpler to go at life solo. “Friendship has unique rewards,” I told him. “They can be unpredictable. For instance....” I couldn’t help but pause to smile crookedly at an old memory that was dear to my heart. Then I shared with my son an unforgettable incident from my younger years. “True story. When I was about your age, I decided to try out for a school play. Tryouts were to begin after the last class of the day, but first I had to run home to grab a couple props for the monologue I planned to perform during tryouts. Silly me, I had left them at the house that morning. Luckily, I only lived across a long expanse of grassy field that separated the school from the nearest neighborhood. Unluckily, it was raining and I didn’t have an umbrella. “Determined to get what I needed, I raced home, grabbed my props, and tore back across the field while my friend waited under the dry protection of the school’s wooden eaves. She watched me run in the rain, gesturing for me to go faster while calling out to hurry up or we would be late. “The rain was pouring by that time which was added reason for me to move fast. I didn’t want to look like a wet rat on stage in front of dozens of fellow students. Don’t ask me why I didn’t grab an umbrella from home—teenage pride or lack of focus, I’m not sure—but the increasing rain combined with the hollering from my friend as well as my anxious nerves about trying out for the play had me running far too fast in shoes that lacked any tread. “About a yard from the sidewalk where the grass was worn from foot traffic and consequently muddied from the downpour of rain, I slipped and fell on my hind end. Me, my props, and my dignity slid through the mud and lay there, coated. My things were dripping with mud. I was covered in it. I felt my heart plunge, and I wanted to cry. I probably would have if it hadn’t been for the wonderful thing that happened right then. My crazy friend ran over and plopped herself down in the mud beside me. She wiggled in it, making herself as much a mess as I was. Then she took my slimy hand in hers and pulled us both to our feet. We tried out for the play looking like a couple of swine escaped from a pigsty, laughing the whole time. I never did cry, thanks to my friend. “So yes, my dear son, friendship has its unique rewards—priceless ones.

A careful reading of Scripture reveals that this is God's preferred way to make his presence known on earth - not chiefly through movers, shakers, and A-listers, but rather through out-casts, losers, those of ill repute, and those who were held in low esteem. If we examine Jesus' friendships, for example, we will notice a disproportionately low number of celebrities, powerful politicians, affluent business people, high-society people, prominent leaders, and the like. But if you were a known prostitute or a tax collector, an addict or an alcoholic, a no-name, a leper or a paralytic, or a despised and rejected sinner, your chance of being invited into Jesus' inner circle of friends would increase. So scandalous and unexpected were Jesus' associations that he was accused of being a glutton, a drunk, and a friend of tax collectors and sinners (Luke 7:34). The scribes and Pharisees shamed, scolded, and excluded such sinners for their failure to measure up. Yet these strugglers experienced Jesus as humble, gentle, and kind - attributes the scribes and Pharisees knew little to nothing about, because they were too busy separating the world between the good people and the bad people, the saints and the sinners, the virtuous and the scumbags, the insiders and the outsiders, the worthy and the unworthy. Meanwhile, Jesus was hanging out with, befriending, and welcoming religious society's choice rejects, thereby separating the world between the proud and the humble.

Sending out the Disciples Luke 10 1: AFTER THESE THINGS THE LORD APPOINTED OTHER SEVENTY DISCIPLES AND HE SENT THEM TWO AND TWO BEFORE HIS FACE INTO EVERY CITY AND PLACE; WHITHER HE HIMSELF WOULD COME God is here and now. God is not something outside you, God is within you. God is the innermost core of existence. That is what Jesus means with: "Repent, for the kingdom of God is near". God is not separate from the creation. He is one with the creation. When you understand this, your life becomes a prayer. When you understand this, you will understand that existence is a family. You will understand that life is togetherness. When we discover our authentic inner being, the kingdom of God, we understand that everybody is a messenger. We discover that the divine source expands, and we spread love to all with whom we interact. Jesus sent out his disciples two and two, so that they did not have to go alone. They went two and two in friendship, in love, in trust, so that they could help each other. THEREFORE SAID HE UNTO THEM, THE HARVEST TRULY IS GREAT, BUT THE LABORERS ARE FEW The harvest is great, but there are not many laborers. People are deaf and blind. Somebody like Jesus comes, and you do not want to listen. It has always been like this. Rather than listening to Jesus, people get so jealous of Jesus, that they crucified him. Only very aware and understanding people will listen to Jesus. GO YOUR WAYS: BEHOLD I SEND YOU FORTH AS LAMBS AMONG THE WOLVES Jesus knows that he is sending his disciples into a dangerous world. People will not understand what they say, they do not want to listen, and they cling to their ideas and their tradition. Jesus knows that trust is to be attacked. He knows that love is to be attacked. CARRY NEITHER PURSE, NOR SHOES, AND SALUTE NO MAN BY THE WAY AND INTO WHATSOVER HOUSE YE ENTER, FIRST SAY, PEACE BE TO THIS HOUSE Jesus says that the love and the truth can create troubles for you. "Do not carry purse, do not wear shoes, go barefoot. Do not salute no man on the road". Be ordinary, be simple, be egoless. Jesus says bring peace to the house, because only in that peaceful milieu can the message can delievered. Create a spiritual vibration of peace, spread the feeling of peace, and if you are really feeling it, it will spread. When somebody comes to see you, settle within yourself, Become silent. And you will see a change in the man. We are joined together by our hearts. We exist as parts of one heart. That heart is God. If you create a feeling of peace, it will spread around you. If your gift of peace is accepted, it will be good. If it is not accepted, if you gift is rejcted, it is also good. The peace will still shower on you. HE THAT HEARETH YOU, HEARETH ME, AND HE THAT DESPISETH YOU, DESPISETH ME: AND HE THAT DESPISETH ME DESPISETH HIM THAT SENT ME Jesus says: If people hear you, they hear me. And if they hear me, they hear the one who has sent me.

In the valleys, it was already night, lamps coming on in the mossy, textured loam, the fresh-smelling darkness expanding, unfolding its foliage. The three of them drank Old Monk, watched as the black climbed all the way past their toes and their knees, the cabbage-leafed shadows reaching out and touching them on their cheeks, noses, enveloping their faces. The black climbed over the tops of their heads and on to extinguish Kachenjunga glowing a last brazen pornographic pink... each of them separately remembered how many evenings they'd spent like this... how unimaginable it was that they would soon come to an end. Here Sai had learned how music, alcohol, and friendship together could create a grand civilization. "Nothing so sweet, dear friends -" Uncle Potty would say raising his glass before he drank. There were concert halls in Europe to which Father Booty would soon return, opera houses where music molded entire audiences into a single grieving or celebrating heart, and where the applause rang like a downpour... But could they feel as they did here? Hanging over the mountain, hearts half empty-half full, longing for beauty, for innocence that now knows. With passion for the beloved or for the wide world or for worlds beyond this one... Sai thought of how it had been unclear to her what exactly she longed for in the early days at Cho Oyu, that only the longing itself found its echo in her aching soul. The longing was gone now, she thought, and the ache seemed to have found its substance.

I USED to imagine life divided into separate compartments, consisting, for example, of such dual abstractions as pleasure and pain, love and hate, friendship and enmity; and more material classifications like work and play: a profession or calling being, according to that concept—one that seemed, at least on the surface, unequivocally assumed by persons so dissimilar from one another as Widmerpool and Archie Gilbert—something entirely different from ‘spare time’. That illusion—as such a point of view was, in due course, to appear—was closely related to another belief: that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments. As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; so that, at last, diversity between them, if in truth existent, seems to be almost imperceptible except in a few crude and exterior ways: unthinkable as formerly appeared any single consummation of cause and effect. In other words, nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out at last to be tenaciously interrelated; love and hate, friendship and enmity, too, becoming themselves much less clearly defined, more often than not showing signs of possessing characteristics that could claim, to say the least, not a little in common; while work and play merge indistinguishably into a complex tissue of pleasure and tedium.

maternal love, the most successful object of the religious imagination of romantic art. For the most part real and human, it is yet entirely spiritual, without the interest and exigency of desire, not sensuous and yet present: absolutely satisfied and blissful spiritual depth. It is a love without craving, but it is not friendship; for be friendship never so rich in emotion, it yet demands a content, something essential, as a mutual end and aim. Whereas, without any reciprocity of aim and interests, maternal love has an immediate support in the natural bond of connection. But in this instance the mother’s love is not at all restricted to the natural side. In the child which she conceived and then bore in travail, Mary has the complete knowledge and feeling of herself; and the same child, blood of her blood, stands all the same high above her, and nevertheless this higher being belongs to her and is the object in which she forgets and maintains herself. The natural depth of feeling in the mother’s love is altogether spiritualized; it has the Divine as its proper content, but this spirituality remains lowly and unaware, marvellously penetrated by natural oneness and human feeling. It is the blissful maternal love, the love of the one mother alone who was the first recipient of this joy. Of course this love too is not without grief, but the grief is only the sorrow of loss, lamentation for her suffering, dying, and dead son, and does not, as we shall see at a later stage,[9] result from injustice and torment from without, or from the infinite battle against sins, or from the agony and pain brought about by the self. Such deep feeling is here spiritual beauty, the Ideal, human identification of man with God, with the spirit and with truth: a pure forgetfulness and complete self-surrender which still in this forgetfulness is from the beginning one with that into which it is merged and now with blissful satisfaction has a sense of this oneness. In such a beautiful way maternal love, the picture as it were of the Spirit, enters romantic art in place of the Spirit itself because only in the form of feeling is the Spirit made prehensible by art, and the feeling of the unity between the individual and God is present in the most original, real, and living way only in the Madonna’s maternal love. This love must enter art necessarily if, in the portrayal of this sphere, the Ideal, the affirmative satisfied reconciliation is not to be lacking. There was therefore a time when the maternal love of the blessed Virgin belonged in general to the highest and holiest [part of religion] and was worshipped and represented as this supreme fact. But when the Spirit brings itself into consciousness of itself in its own element, separated from the whole natural grounding which feeling supplies, then too it is only the spiritual mediation, free from such a grounding, that can be regarded as the free route to the truth; and so, after all, in Protestantism, in contrast to mariolatry in art and in faith, the Holy Spirit and the inner mediation of the Spirit has become the higher truth.

Because sober or not, until you start to tell the truth, you're going to be desperately lonely. Perhaps this is obvious, but I'm pretty sure it escapes most of us. We know we're lonely...but we don't really know why...I felt a nagging ache of separateness I could not name. Despite being surrounded by people, having a big social life, more plans than I had time for, and a solid group of people I considered friends, I still felt very much alone. I felt alone in my marriage. I felt alone in my friendships, And actually being alone by myself? Forget it - that was intolerable... Loneliness started to abate only when I began to really let people in and tell them the truth, and that took a long, long time. The antidote to loneliness wasn't just being around others or sharing common ground. It was intimacy. My friend Meadow's definition of intimacy...she says, "Intimacy is having a kind, compassionate witness to your truest thoughts and feelings." Having a witness also means being seen. Really seen. In all our humanity - flaws and ugly bits and all. Even the most courageous of us are willing to go about 90 percent of the way there, but we hold on to that last 10 percent, the part that could allow us to be really known. Sobriety hasn't so much been about revealing the 90 percent but that last 10. The little bit I always want to keep to myself. The problem is, 10 percent of withholding, or secretiveness, will still eventually contaminate the whole...And keeping 10 percent of yourself from your partner, or whomever you could trust with your heart, will make you 100 percent lonely.

But among those 150 people, Dunbar stressed that there are hierarchical "layers of friendship" determined by how much time you spend with the person. It's kind of like a wedding cake where the topmost layer consist of only one or two people—say, a spouse and best friend—with whom you are most intimate and interact daily. The next layer can accommodate at most four people for whom you have great affinity, affection, and concern. Friendships at this level require weekly attention to maintain. Out from there, the tiers contain more casual friends who you see less often and thus, your ties are more tenuous. Without consistent contact, they easily fall into the realm of acquaintance. At this point, you are friendly but not really friends, because you've lost touch with who they are, which is always evolving. You could easily have a beer with them, but you wouldn't miss them terribly, or even notice right way, if they moved out of town. Nor would they miss you. An exception might be friends with whom you feel like you can pick up right where you left or even though you haven't talked to them for ages. According to Dunbar, these are usually friendships forged through extensive and deep listening at some point in your life, usually during an emotionally wrought time, like during college or early adulthood, or maybe during a personal crisis like an illness or divorce. It's almost as if you have banked a lot of listening that you can draw on later to help you understand and relate to that person even after significant time apart. Put another way, having listened well and often to someone in the past makes it easier to get back on the same wavelength when you get out of sync, perhaps due to physical separation or following a time of emotional distance caused by an argument.

There was a mild, damp wind blowing. It was weather I was quite familiar with; and a sudden feeling and presentiment ran through me: that New Year’s Day was not a day that differed from any other, not the first day of a new life when I could remake the acquaintance of Gilberte with the die still uncast, as though on the very first day of Creation when no past yet existed, as though the sorrows she had sometimes caused me had been wiped out, and with them all the future ones they might portend, as though I lived in a new world in which nothing remained of the old except one thing: my wish that Gilberte would love me. I realized that, since my heart yearned in this way for the redesign of a universe which had not satisfied it, this meant that my heart had not changed; and I could see there was no reason why Gilberte’s should have changed either. I sensed that, though it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though[…]“it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that though we may put different names to them, they remain beyond the reach of our yearnings, unaware of these and unaffected by them. Though I might dedicate this year to Gilberte, though I might try to imprint upon New Year’s Day the special notion I had made up for it, as a religion is superimposed on the blind workings of nature, it was in vain: I was aware that this day did not know it was called New Year’s Day, and that it was coming to an end in the twilight in a way that was not unknown to me. What I recognized, what I sensed “in that mild wind blowing about the Morris column with its posters, was the reappearance of former times, with the never-ending unchangingness of their substance, their familiar dampness, their ignorant fluidity.

We are still young, but we have done something remarkable already. We have stayed together. I think where we find ourselves is extremely significant. Significant because the next seven years, I think, are going to be final in a way that the last seven have not. In the next seven years every one of us will be in our thirties, some nearing forty. We are already starting marriages, families, careers, and settling into cities. In the next seven years those things are going to become more and more entrenched. The concrete we’re pouring into the habits of our lives is going to dry, and we are going to become the kind of people that we’re going to be for a long, long time. Let me put it another way. The college years and the early twenties lend themselves to a kind of emotional radicalness where you actually can and do completely shift your habits, and we become new people. That window, however, is likely closing. Thus, I think now is the time to consider seriously what kinds of people we are becoming. We have a good start, but I think the next seven years will be far more determinative of what kinds of friends we will be in the long run. The next seven years will show: Will we have the kind of friendships that sustain us through rocky years in marriage? Maybe more important, will we have the kind of friendships that sustain us through the difficulties of not being married yet? Will we have the kind of friends who live as examples to one another’s kids? Will we be the kind of friends who support one another financially if a job or business falls through or support one another emotionally if we hit dead ends in our careers? Will we be the kind of friends who won’t ignore and won’t let one another get into bad emotional, physical, sexual, or financial habits? I think the summary of what I’m longing for, the reasons why I decided to write all this down, is I see the beginnings of a covenant between us. And I see the possibility of covenant relationships forming in the long run. And I want to name the goodness, to give words to what the Lord is doing among us. I want to call one another not simply by what we are but by what we are hoping to become. I think that might be “covenant friends.” I leave whatever form it takes to you, but what I hope is that we begin to think and talk of one another in these terms, in terms of covenant relationships, where we acknowledge that the Lord is binding us together in ways that we don’t have the option to separate. In conclusion, I think our next seven years may be our most important, and I want us to consider pushing into those years consciously, as covenant friends. It might go a long way toward what I hope for as our end. This is what I imagine: that in the long run we will look at one another and say, “I have a lot of friends, but none like you.

To see how we separate, we first have to examine how we get together. Friendships begin with interest. We talk to someone. They say something interesting and we have a conversation about it. However, common interests don’t create lasting bonds. Otherwise, we would become friends with everyone with whom we had a good conversation. Similar interests as a basis for friendship doesn’t explain why we become friends with people who have completely different interests than we do. In time, we discover common values and ideals. However, friendship through common values and ideals doesn’t explain why atheists and those devout in their faith become friends. Vegans wouldn’t have non-vegan friends. In the real world, we see examples of friendships between people with diametrically opposed views. At the same time, we see cliques form in churches and small organizations dedicated to a particular cause, and it’s not uncommon to have cliques inside a particular belief system dislike each other. So how do people bond if common interests and common values don’t seem to be the catalyst for lasting friendships? I find that people build lasting connections through common problems and people grow apart when their problems no longer coincide. This is why couples especially those with children tend to lose their single friends. Their primary problems have become vastly different. The married person’s problems revolve around family and children. The single person’s problem revolves around relationships with others and themselves. When the single person talks about their latest dating disaster, the married person is thinking I’ve already solved this problem. When the married person talks about finding good daycare, the single person is thinking how boring the problems of married life can be. Eventually marrieds and singles lose their connection because they don’t have common problems. I look back at friends I had in junior high and high school. We didn’t become friends because of long nights playing D&D. That came later. We were all loners and outcasts in our own way. We had one shared problem that bound us together: how to make friends and relate to others while feeling so “different”. That was the problem that made us friends. Over the years as we found our own answers and went to different problems, we grew apart. Stick two people with completely different values and belief systems on a deserted island where they have to cooperate to survive. Then stick two people with the same values and interests together at a party. Which pair do you think will form the stronger bond? When I was 20, I was living on my own. I didn’t have many friends who were in college because I couldn’t relate to them. I was worrying about how to pay rent and trying to stretch my last few dollars for food at the end of the month. They were worried about term papers. In my life now, the people I spend the most time with have kids, have careers, are thinking about retirement and are figuring out their changing roles and values as they get older. These are problems that I relate to. We solve them in different ways because our values though compatible aren’t similar. I feel connected hearing about how they’ve chosen to solve those issues in a way that works for them.