Do not save your loving speeches for your friends till they are dead; Do not write them on their tombstones, speak them rather now instead.

Anais Nin:

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it’s only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Edna Buchanan:

True friends are those who really know you but love you anyway.

Christina Baldwin:

Friendship has no civil, and few emotional, rights in our society.

Dorothy Parker:

Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship.

Edith Wharton:

I suppose 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.

Edna Buchanan:

Friends are the family we choose for ourselves.

Emily Dickinson:

My friends are my estate.

Fran Lebowitz:

[Friendships] are easy to get out of compared to love affairs, but they are not easy to get out of compared to, say, jail.

Grace Metalious:

Funny, you don’t look like a friend – ah, but they never do.

Anais Nin:

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

Jane Austen:

Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.

Katherine Mansfield:

I always feel that the great high privilege, relief and comfort for friendship was that one had to explain nothing.

Louise Bernikow:

Female friendships that work are relationships in which women help each other to belong to themselves.

Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach:

In meeting again after a separation, acquaintances ask after our outward life, friends after our inner life.

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal:

True friendship is never tranquil.

Marlene Dietrich:

It’s the ones you can call up at 4:00 a.m. that matter.

Nancy Spain:

There are people whom one loves immediately and forever. Even to know they are alive in the world with one is quite enough.

Phyllis McGinley:

Relations are errors that Nature makes. / Your spouse you can put up on the shelf. / But your friends, dear friends, are the quaint mistakes / You always commit, yourself.

Queen Elizabeth I:

Prosperity provideth, but adversity proveth friends.

Sophie Irene Loeb:

A friend is one who withholds judgment no matter how long you have his unanswered letter.

Susan Ferrier:

A friend in need is a friend indeed.