As You Get Older Friendship Quotes & Sayings

As I get older, I am becoming more selective of who I consider a friend. I find that I would rather have 4 quarters than 100 pennies. — Steve Maraboli

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. — Abigail George

The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time. — Anna Quindlen

I was going to say 'my friend Stuart', but I suppose he's not a friend any more. I seem to have lost a number of friends in the last few years. I don't mean that I've fallen out with them, in any dramatic way. We've just decided not to stay in touch. And that's what it's been: a decision, a conscious decision, because it's not difficult to stay in touch with people nowadays, there are so many different ways of doing it. But as you get older, I think that some friendships start to feel increasingly redundant. You just find yourself asking, "What's the point?" And then you stop. — Jonathan Coe

No, the point of this story is that there are only a select few friends, past or present, that I would go to such lengths to stand by. That's what school really taught me: the enduring nature of friendship. How special it is to grow up and share a history with someone. As I've gotten older, friendships rooted in childhood feel even richer and more irreplaceable. — Connor Franta

There was something to what he said, for it was true that the people I met on the job were generally much older than me, with a set of concerns and demands that created barriers to friendship. When I wasn't working, the weekends would usually find me alone in an empty apartment, making do with the company of books. I — Barack Obama

As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another. — Jonathan Lethem

The older I get, the more I believe that if love is to be judged by most of its visible effects, it looks more like hatred than friendship. — Paul Hoffman

When I was very young and in the cave of Trophonius I forgot to laugh. Then, when I got older, when I opened my eyes and saw the real world, I began to laugh and I haven't stopped since. I saw that the meaning of life was to get a livelihood, that the goal of life was to be a High Court judge, that the bright joy of love was to marry a well-off girl, that the blessing of friendship was to help each other out of a financial tight spot, that wisdom was what the majority said it was, that passion was to give a speech, that courage was to risk being fined 10 rix-dollars, that cordiality was to say 'You're welcome' after a meal, and that the fear of God was to go to communion once a year. That's what I saw. And I laughed. — Soren Kierkegaard

Because school, no matter how insignificant and annoying it may seem as we get older and can't wait to get away, sets us on our life's path. It's plants ideas for us to thrive upon, teaches us where we want to go and who we want to be - feeding us the notion that our dreams are limitless, that we can do anything if we believe in it enough and truly set our minds to it. But, best of all, it encourages us to seek friendships of others, to learn to lean on them for support and to console them in return. After all, it's the people you meet along the way who really make a lasting impression and who will, if your lucky, stick with you for the rest of your life. — Giovanna Fletcher

As I grow older, I think friendship between women is a thing to cherish. — Susan Glaspell

There's an innocence to her still that amazes me. Sometimes I forget she's older than me. Then, I remember that she hasn't gone through what I've gone through. — Zoe Cruz

The older you get, the easier it is for you to distinguish between your friends and people you are not seeing for the first time. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

a thousand dollars reward for whoever found him. But it came to nothing. Father Duchene and our friends down there are still looking. But the older I grow, the more I understand what it was I did that night on the mesa. Anyone who requites faith and friendship as I did, will have to pay for it. I'm not very sanguine about good fortune for myself. I'll be called to account when I least expect it. In — Willa Cather

A lot of friendship is about practice, that's something I've learned as I've gotten older. It's not simply some spiritual soul-bond of memories and longings, it's really about having coffee every week, or talking on the phone every day or every other day - whatever suits you. — Ann Brashares

What Caul liked most about Tom was his kindness. Kindness was not valued back in Grimsby, where the older boys were encouraged to torment the younger ones, who would grow up to torment another batch of youngsters in their turn. "Good practice for life," Uncle said. "Hard knocks, that's all the world's about!" But maybe Uncle had never met anyone like Tom, who was kind to other people and seemed to expect nothing more than kindness in return. — Philip Reeve

Approaching the Start of Civil Exams

Perhaps I was once a young Chinese scholar
approaching the start of civil exams,
my mind grown weary and sad from seclusion
with books on syntax and poetic style.

All that I knew were the mist-covered mountains
and sweet white blossoms of mountain apples
that grew in the valleys of my province.

But I had been gone over six years
busy with studies in the Heavenly City
empty and thin despite my work.

I showed my verses to an older poet
who told me a truth I longed to believe:
all knowledge is futile and barren
which does not open the love of your friends. — Jim Chapson

That's how it was on Irving Circle and how I was raised: You made the best out of what was within reach, which meant friendships engineered by parents and by the happenstance of housing. I stayed with it because we both had queenly older sisters who rarely condescended to play with us, because Shelley was adopted and I was not, because Shelley had Clue and Life, and I did not — Elinor Lipman

Narcissus's thoughts were far more occupied with Goldmund than Goldmund imagined. He wanted the bright boy as a friend. He sensed in him his opposite, his complement; he would have liked to adopt, lead, enlighten, strengthen, and bring him to bloom. But he held himself back, for many reasons, almost all of them conscious. Most of all, he felt tied and hemmed in by his distaste for teachers or monks who, all too frequently, fell in love with a pupil or a novice. Often enough, he had felt with repulsion the desiring eyes of older men upon him, had met their enticements and cajoleries with wordless rebuttal. He understood them better now that he knew the temptation to love the charming boy, to make him laugh, to run a caressing hand through his blond hair. But he would never do that, never. — Hermann Hesse

The thing is, that when you're young, you always think you'll meet all sorts of wonderful people, that drifting apart and losing friends is natural. You don't worry, at first, about the friends you leave behind. But as you get older, it gets harder to build friendships. Too many defenses, too little opportunity. You get busy. And by the time you realize that you've lost the dearest best friend you've ever had, years have gone by and you're mature enough to be embarrassed by your attitude and, frankly, by your arrogance. — Kate Jacobs

Tshepo reckons that it is inevitable that one's circle of friends will become smaller as one grows older. He reasons that when we begin we are similar, like two glasses of water sitting side by side on a clean tray. There is very little that differentiates us. We are simple beings whose interests do not extend beyond playing touch and kicking balls.
However, like the two glasses of water forgotten on a tray in the reading room, we start to collect bits. Bits of fluff, bits of a broken beetle wing, bits of bread, bits of pollen, bits of shed epithelial cells, bits of hair, bits of toilet paper, bits of airborne fungal organisms, bits of bits. All sorts of bits. No two combinations the same. Just like with the glasses of water, Environment, jealous of our fundamentality, bombards our basic minds with complexity. So we become frighteningly dissimilar, until there is very little that holds us together. — Kopano Matlwa

Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadn't happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren't necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with. If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic. — Hanya Yanagihara

When you're younger, you don't appreciate your parents and all that they've done for you. Loving your parents is seen as uncool, and all that matters is your friends, booze, and girls, girls, girls. But the older you get, you realize that your parents are going to be there for you when your friends and girlfriends are long gone. Friendship comes and goes, but family is forever. — Monica James

Or drive up to his parents' house, one of you plugging into the car's stereo an outlandish playlist, with which you would both sing along, loudly, being extravagantly silly as adults the way you never were as children. As you got older, you realize that really, there were very few people you truly wanted to be around for more than a few days at a time, and yet here you were with someone you wanted to be around for years, even when he was at his most opaque and confusing. — Hanya Yanagihara

And oh! I shall find how, day by day, All thoughts and things look older; How the laugh of pleasure grows less gay, And the heart of friendship colder. — Winthrop Mackworth Praed

Skye kissed her forehead. "You saved my life."
Katsa smiled. "You Lienid are very outward in your affection."
"I'm going to name my firstborn child after you."
Katsa laughed at that. "For the child's sake, wait for a girl. Or even better, wait until all your children are older and give my name to whichever is the most troublesome and obstinate."
Skye burst into laughter and hugged her, and Katsa returned his embrace. And realized that quite without her intending it, her guarded heart had made another friend. — Kristin Cashore

I knew," he breathed, pressing his forehead to mine, "when I developed a crush on you." My eyes flashed open.
"But we drifted apart," I whispered.
He shook his head. "I was scared of how you'd react, that my feelings would complicate things, ruin our friendship. That is why we didn't hang out much as we got older. We didn't drift apart. I pushed you away. — Shaye Evans

No, Geo - underneath all that, Nan really loves me. It's just she wants me to see things her way. You know, she's two years older; that meant a lot when we were children. I've always thought of her as being sort of like a road - I mean, she leads somewhere. With her, I'll never lose my way. — Christopher Isherwood

Friends are lights in winter; the older the friend, the brighter the light. — Roger Rosenblatt

{Letter from Debbs to Eva Ingersoll, husband of Robert Ingersoll, just after the news of Robert's death}

We were inexpressibly shocked to hear of the sudden death of your dear husband and our best loved friend. Most tenderly do we sympathize with you, and all of yours in your great bereavement... Gifted with the rarest genius, in beautiful alliance with his heroism, his kindness and boundless love, he made the name of Ingersoll immortal.

To me, he was an older brother and as I loved him living, so will I cherish his sweet memory forever. — Eugene V. Debs

I think when you're kids, you're less . . . defined? Then you get older and you start deciding what kind of person you want to be, and it doesn't always match up with what your friends are turning into. — Tana French

When you get older, everybody sort of changes and moves away. I think that stands the test of time, when you have a friendship from youth that's still in your life today. — Michelle Gomez

As you grow older, you realize it becomes less important to have more friends and more important to have real ones.
People nowadays don't know the true meaning of friendship and loyalty.
People always suddenly miss you more once they see how much happier you are without them.
Learn the real from the fake ... and don't worry about the mistakes you make.
There are no mistakes in life, just lessons.
The only people worthy to be in your life are the ones that help you through the hard times and laugh with you after the hard times pass. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Youth is beautiful; its friendship is precious; the intercourse with it is a purifying release from the worn and stained harness of older life. — Nathaniel Parker Willis

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable. — Bruce Lee

I don't know if I've ever been in a clique. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized what a true friend really is. So my friendship circle has changed a bit. — Aimee Teegarden

Feed a stray dog when you get lonesome for me. Check on some of the older ladies in town that have no help when you get lonesome for me. Or better yet, go to church. I bet you haven't been twice since the funeral. I'm not in the casket, Carrigan, and I'm not at the cemetery..I never was. No, go live, and stop obsessing on this. — Celeste Fletcher McHale