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"There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books."
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Exlpore more Friendship quotes
"Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse."
"Unfailing friends are essential, when 'presence' and 'absence' are wrangling in our daily living, and our presence is rampaged by murk and woe, while passion and lust for life are trampled. Reliable allies can shore us up and since we are our best ally, we first have got to make sure we get along well with ourselves. ("Being my best friend)."
"A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends."
"Two are better than one,because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lif' up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up."
"As Isabel acted out her date, both of them laughing, I stayed in the kitchen, out of sight, and pretended she was telling me, too. And that, for once, I was part of this hidden language of laughter and silliness and girls that was, somehow, friendship."
"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
"Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never."
"How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing."
"One of the great things personally coming to Hawai'i is my friendship of Jim Nicholson."
"Friendship is held to be the severest test of character."
Explore more quotes by Norman MacCaig
"People haven't got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share."
"A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest."
"All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed."
"When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man."
"When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous."
"It's like breathing in and out to me. It's like having a conversation with someone who isn't there. Because it has to be addressed to somebody - not a particular person, or very rarely."
"But I hang on to books. I love them. I even think they're very nice decor in a room - far better than paintings... That's not quite true!"
"I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense."
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