Old Best Friends New Strangers Quotes & Sayings

Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life. — Adam Gopnik

McGahern still lives on and works a farm in Leitrim, and friends say that even though he has held high profile academic posts round the world as a visiting professor he remains essentially a countryman.

Last term he taught in an upstate New York college, but seeing him in the soulless urban grid of downtown Syracuse wearing an old tweed flat cap and long black overcoat, he could have been in an Irish agricultural town on market day as he casually engaged strangers on the street to ask for advice on finding a decent restaurant. Friends say he has extraordinary confidence in who he is and where he's from - he behaves pretty much the same way wherever is and whoever he is with. — John McGahern

Akira often gets mad at me because he thinks I'm too nice to strangers, and cold as a fish at home. What can I do? He's right, but that's the way I am. I'm more enthusiastic about people I've just met, whom I barely know at all, than with old friends. Before the awkwardness of a new acquaintance has worn off, I'm ready to offer myself up to that person. — Banana Yoshimoto