C. S. Lewis on friendship

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’

Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Albert Camus1913–1960

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Martin Luther King Jr.1929–1968Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, Steeler Lecture, November 1967.

I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they’re gone. I guess I just miss my friend.

Morgan Freemanborn 1937The Shawshank Redemption