Summary: Friendship is necessary work you must do even though it will fail.
Be brave, show up with small offers, and let ordinary moments build closeness.
Choose gentleness, stay findable, and bless people as they change or leave.
Nietzsche: friends should be arrows you fire into the future, meant to wound you, to test you, to make you stronger. Lovely. Except most of us are just happy if someone answers our texts. (View Highlight)
friendship is impossible, and therefore it must be done. If it were possible, it wouldn’t matter. Only impossibilities have meaning. Only impossibilities are worth doing. (View Highlight)
You cannot stare each other into closeness; you can only arrive there while both of you are staring at something else and accidentally become co-conspirators. (View Highlight)
The soul does not open by decree; it opens under the protection of an end-time. (View Highlight)
Do not overthink the gift. The point is not value; it is proof of motion. (View Highlight)
If you can be boring together you can be alive together. (View Highlight)
If you keep a ledger, you are an auditor, not a friend. The universe does not balance; the kindness must. (View Highlight)
The aim is not to be two halves of one person but two complete people orbiting a third thing that neither of you owns. (View Highlight)
You are selecting a co-witness for the apocalypse. Choose for gentleness. (View Highlight)
Friendship is logistics performed tenderly. (View Highlight)
Resist the autopsy. Wish them a gentle life and walk on. Compost the disappointment; it will grow something improbable. (View Highlight)
A friend is the person who proves you exist when your own gaze slips. A friend is the witness at the small trial of every day. Together you invent a jurisdiction that can overrule the world (View Highlight)
each particular friend is an emissary. A courier for the Infinite Friend. You’ve met them. You keep meeting them. (View Highlight)
friendship is not the warm bath of recognition; it is the safe-cracking of reality. Two idiots put their ears to the vault door of the world and whisper, “On three.” Click. (View Highlight)
They vanish. Then the universe quietly rearranges itself to put them back in front of you at the bakery you never go to, holding the one croissant that looks like a fossilised ear. (View Highlight)
All theology of friendship is podiatric. (View Highlight)
Cowardice in company transubstantiates into mercy. (View Highlight)
Every friendship is a rehearsal for the final conversation the universe wants to have with you. (View Highlight)
Memory is not faithfulness; it’s the thing friendship leaves to keep you from dying of sobriety (View Highlight)
honour the interruptions. Friendship is an interruption of yourself by the world and of the world by yourself. If nothing interrupts you, you are not living; you are a screensaver. Go be interrupted. Go be available to be changed. The door is heavy, but it’s on your side of the hinge. (View Highlight)