Staff Writer Heather Bottoms is a used book lover, theatre geek, and compulsive volunteer. When she is not curating her Little Free Library, she is working at her local community theatre or over-preparing for book club. She hosts book swaps, leads an LGBT-themed book club, and loves to see people bonding over books. She lives with her computer nerd/musician husband and three kids in Tennessee. Follow her on Twitter @HeatherBottoms. View All posts by Heather Bottoms
Heather Bottoms
“Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.” —Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
“It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another’s ambitions.” —Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.” —L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
“She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.” —Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
“Well, you can’t make old friends.” —Zadie Smith, Swing Time
“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.” —Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
“It’s not enough to be friendly. You have to be a friend.” —R.J. Palacio, Wonder
“‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.’” —E.B. White,Charlotte’s Web
“She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was incomparable richness in it.” —Alice Walker, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart
“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.” —P.G. Wodehouse, from “Strychnine in the Soup” in Mulliner Nights
“The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.” —Barbara Kingsolver, from “Stone Soup” in High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never
“We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.” —Maya Angelou, I Shall Not Be Moved
“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” —Toni Morrison, Beloved
“Friendship…is born at the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…’” —C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“A good friend is a connection to life—a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world.” —Lois Wyse, Women Make the Best Friends: A Celebration
“I knew when I met you an adventure was going to happen.” —A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
“The best kind of laughter is laughter born of a shared memory.” —Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me?
“The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings.” —Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
“The companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.” —Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
“Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.” —John Green, Turtles All the Way Down
“They were all growing up and into each other like trees striving together for the sun.” —Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King
“We clung to books and to our friends; they reminded us that we had another part to us.” —Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
“Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything.” —Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
“No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.” —Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
Are you a quote fanatic? Need more? Try these:
51 Beautiful YA Book Quotes
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45 Aww-Inspiring Quotes about Books
Share your favorite literary friendship quotes in the comments!
