The Chosen Friendship Quotes & Sayings

Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it's a negative importance, it's the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because I don't count. I feel singled out, but also bereft. — Margaret Atwood

Friendship, as far as I'm concerned, is a delicate and rare thing that's built up over time and is predicated on mutual trust, mutual respect, reciprocal interests and share commitments. It's a relation that ultimately is lived out, at least as if it were chosen not taken for granted or assumed in advance. It's something that has to be renegotiated at every step, not demanded unconditionally. — Chris Kraus

You do NOT fear your OWN ability to COMMIT. Just think about your unwavering dedication to your career, your notion of sisterhood and friendship. You are tireless. That is why we all lean on you. Because you are totally committed to the lot of us. You do not have a "fear of commitment" that's just an easy way out of all of this. What you have dearest one, is a deep seated and totally understandable fear of OTHER people's commitment to YOU.
I totally wholeheartedly agree, you've never been in love. Until Zac, you've chosen chaps whom you've simply liked but who have loved you. so when it's over, it hasn't hurt you.
Why have you done this, over all these years? I'll tell you why, because what YOU actually fear is being left by someone YOU love.
Your fear of COMMITMENT centres solely on another's commitment to YOU'It makes — Freya North

Loneliness chosen is always preferable to loneliness imposed — Bell Hooks

Indian spirituality, proclaimed that the true Godhead was beyond number and count; that it had many manifestations which did not exclude or repel each other but included each other, and went together in friendship; that it was approached in different ways and through many symbols; that it resided in the hearts of its devotees. Here there were no chosen people, no exclusive prophethoods, no privileged churches and fraternities and ummas. The message was subversive of all religions based on exclusive claims. — Ram Swarup

I must love and be loved. I must feel that my dear and chosen friends are happier through me. When I have wandered out of myself in my endeavour to shed pleasure around, I must again return laden with the gathered sweets on which I feed and live. Permit this to be, unblamed - permit a heart whose sufferings have been, and are, so many and so bitter, to reap what joy it can from the necessity it feels to be sympathized with - to love. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Significantly, romantic friendships can coexist with the fact of partners' marrying because their reason for being is not to replace marriage but to open the possibility of sustained, committed true love existing among friends, and not just same-sex friends. No matter that our chosen relationship commitments change. Those of us who have long-term romantic friendships, some that have lasted longer than any of our marriages or partnerships, do not fear that these commitments will falter if we create primary bonds. — Bell Hooks

Where would you be without friends? The people to pick you up when you need lifting? We come from homes far from perfect, so you end up almost parent and sibling to your friends - your own chosen family. There's nothing like a really loyal, dependable, good friend. Nothing. — Jennifer Aniston

So Sonia was not my only or even my first best friend. She was the last. It wasn t that I hadn t made friends since just that I thought myself past the age of that particular kind of friendship. Adult friendship doesn t grant you an exclusive isn t meant to be ranked above romance and family. I couldn t imagine ever living that moment again when you say with a shy and hopeful pride You re my best friend. The other person says it back and there you have chosen each other out of everyone else in the world. — Leah Stewart

I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. Distrusting the approval of the chosen, I would take the applause of exiles anytime. My friends were all foreigners, and they wore their unbelongingness in their eyes. I hunted for that look; I saw it often, disarrayed and fragmentary and furious, and I approached every boy who invited me in. — Pat Conroy

Before you lie courage, perseverance, kindness, friendship, and love. Before you lie men and women who could have chosen otherwise, who could have inured themselves to the injustices of the world, rather than giving their lives to change it. Tonight we honor them. Tonight we also honor all who have gone before and paved the way, the ones we remember and the ones we have forgotten.
But nothing is lost in Eternity. A moment of grace resonates forever, as does an act of valor. So honor the dead- and live in grace and valor. — Sherry Thomas

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness. — Samuel Johnson

And so, though Smith was not at all the man Knight would have deliberately chosen as a friend - or even for one of a group of a dozen friends - he somehow was his friend. Circumstance, as usual, did it all. How many of us can say of our most intimate alter ego, leaving alone friends of the outer circle, that he is the man we should have chosen, as embodying the net result after adding up all the points in human nature that we love, and principles we hold, and subtracting all that we hate? The man is really somebody we got to know by mere physical juxtaposition long maintained, and was taken into our confidence, and even heart, as a makeshift. — Thomas Hardy

From the moment I met Christina Georgia, I knew why Mr. Bradshaw had chosen her. She was incredibly smart and thoughtful, and her emerald green eyes were huge and wise. Her wispy blond hair was beautiful and shoulder-length, and her bubblegum pink lips stood out on her pale face. She was awesome, and we were friends after about two minutes of talking. — Embee

Friendship is special because it is freely chosen. Our friends want us as their friend for our own sake. No other relationship, either professional or kinship, can give what friendship gives. — Hans Reinders

And that's how it was with Garrett. Because he understood me, the me I wanted so desperately to be. Think about your best friend - how you tell them everything, how they're the person who knows you best, all your deepest fears and insecurities. They're the one you call when something amazing happens or when everything falls apart and you need someone to come over and watch movies and tell you that everything's going to be OK. It's not like family, who are obligated to love you and even then sometimes fail to be everything they're supposed to be. Your true friend has chosen you, and you them, and that's a different kind of bond.
That's Garrett to me. I'm used to talking to him all the time, about the most meaningless stuff. To have him gone feels like a loss, an absence haunting me every day. Without him, there's just the empty space that used to be filled with laughter and friendship and comfort.
Can you really blame me for finding it so hard to let go? — Abby McDonald

He's always had a nameless, unanchored longing; and when, at critical points in his life, a period of intense longing coincided with the appearance of a suitable object, he fell for it head over heels, and believed he had discovered a great passion. Poetry, friendship, work, women - each at one time he'd held to be the center of his life.
But since the origin of his passion was internal, the chosen objects couldn't hold him long; and he had to feed his yearning with yet more loss. The deepening spiral could not end well for him ... — Josephine Humphreys

... so many ticks steadily around the clock. My heart beats ferociously, as if to say it will not digest this leaving. But you are gone. I could never look into your tormenting eyes again. You mock me with each word you choose ... . of the millions of words in the English tongue you could have chosen ... you select the one's that break me down. — Coco J. Ginger

It's like he's my family, except better, because I've chosen him. — Patrick Ness

Your friend mourns your losses with you, because they experience them too. The truth is, no matter how lonely you might feel, you're never going through anything alone ... you can choose your family. — Jennifer Lopez

Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In friendship ... we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another ... the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting
any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian friends, "Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another." The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others. — C.S. Lewis

A literary work ... is, during the time one reads it, a friend with whom one has chosen to spend one's time. The question now is, what does this friendship do to my mind? What does this new friend ask me to notice, to desire, to care about? How does he or she invite me to view my fellow human beings? — Wayne C. Booth

The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. IT is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is he who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host. — C.S. Lewis

From open sea she's chosen me
and dashed the hopes of many.
A life with her is worth the hopes
my love for her may bury. — Uzoma C. Azuonye

Friendship is not chosen, he said, it happens, who knows why, like love. And I haven't bestowed anything on you, but on myself; I respect men who remain magnanimous even in their misfortune. — Mesa Selimovic

The life mission God gave you was only appointed to you. If you are faithful, God will send someone into your life to support it. If your are blessed, he will send someone who shares your passion. If you are chosen, he will unlock every door that stands in your way. — Shannon L. Alder