Friends

Friends are the family you choose and, if I may be so bold, I've made some DAMN fine choices. Luckily, they've chosen me too.

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

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.
~ Bob Marley

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
“Pooh!” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
~ A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.
~ Linda Grayson

OR choclate and a glass 'o' Chianti.

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
~ Aristotle

Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.
~ Muhammad Ali

It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like “What about lunch?”
~ A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

All Pooh quotes are The Amazing Bob. All Piglet quotes are me. Christ almighty, I can just about here him saying this right now.

There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.
~ P.G. Wodehouse

TAB and I were both wild for P.K. Dick, Willy the Shake, Vonnegut and more. He brought Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Ginsberg, Rimbaud and André Breton into my life. What’d I bring into his? Art, I suppose. Klimt, Kokaschka, Egon Schiele and me.

The capacity for friendship is God’s way of apologizing for our families.
~ Jay McInerney, The Last of the Savages

Heh, tell it brotha!

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
~ Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

Oh, fer fuck’s sake yes, YES, YES!!!

There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.
~ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone 

If you have good friends, no matter how much life is sucking , they can make you laugh.
~ P.C. Cast

Truth! Over this long, hard, miserable year since TAB took the last train out to Whatever-Comes-NextVille, Jen has made me laugh and, even on the worst days, grin like a fool.

“I don’t feel very much like Pooh today," said Pooh.

"There there," said Piglet. "I’ll bring you tea and honey until you do.”
~ A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.
~ Sylvia Plath