What are friends for? Some quotes on friendship.

Let's brainstorm a few purposes for which friends are for!

To provide something you want (e.g. cocaine, secretarial skills, chocolate)

"In The Americanization of Narcissism, Elizabeth Lunbeck explains that Freud wrote his book on Leonardo during the climax and dissolution of one of the most important relationships in his life, an intensely intimate friendship with Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat doctor who was, for some time, Freud’s coke dealer. Beyond that, the exact nature of their intimacy is a matter of debate. The two exchanged hundreds of letters; Freud’s friends thought Fliess a fraud and a charlatan.
* * *
Freud traveled with another close friend, the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, to Sicily, a trip that both seemed to have highly anticipated. Despite having sent dozens of passionate letters to Ferenczi in anticipation of the trip, however, once they arrived in Italy, Freud reversed course, treating Ferenczi as his secretary, suddenly more interested in working on the book alone than in spending time with his companion. When Ferenczi objected, Freud performed what the narcisphere calls “doing a discard”: he left him, Ferenczi complained, “out in the cold” for the rest of the trip. For his part, Freud criticized Ferenczi for idealizing him, for imagining him omnipotent, something that, Lunbeck argues, Freud had done to Fliess."
Kristin Dombek. The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism. FSG Originals, 2016.

"There is nothing better than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate."
Charles Dickens, quoted in the Peoria, Ill., Journal Star.

To partner in crime

"What is that old saying? A friend is someone who helps you hide the body — that was the gist of this new rapport. I sensed it immediately. My life was going to change. In this strange creature, I’d met my match, my kindred spirit, my ally. Already I wanted to extend my hand, slashed and ready to be shaken in a pact of blood, that was how impressionable and lonely I was. I kept my hands in my pockets, however. This marked the beginning of the dark bond which now paves the way for the rest of my story."
Ottessa Moshfegh. Eileen. New York: Penguin, 2015. p. 97.

To listen to your suffering

"I was so afraid that every session would be the last time I saw her [my therapist] that I made full afternoons out of driving west to see her. I now knew what beauty and intimacy were: this thing we had for one or two hours when she could fit me in between doctor’s appointments."
Jill Soloway. She Wants It: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy. Crown, 2018.

To reflect your suffering

"I didn’t know if the universe actively taught lessons. But if it did, the lesson was that I could not handle what I thought I could handle. The lesson was that I didn’t need to act out with Theo to learn the lesson. I didn’t have to suffer again. The suffering of others, Claire and now Diana, could remind me of my own suffering: the suffering of the past and my potential future suffering. Maybe this is why we did things in groups. Maybe this is why people had friends: so we could see ourselves and our own insanity in them."
Melissa Broder. The Pisces. London: Hogarth, 2018. p. 120.

To answer your call

"Perhaps we’re obsessed as a species with romantic love because it helps propagate our species. But isn’t friendship just as necessary to emotional survival?
When we find the right friend at the right time in our life, or the right teacher, or the right student, our lives are changed forever. Max was the voice that answered back. And he still is."
“An introvert’s guide to friendship.” Sarah Ruhl. New York Times. Dec. 1, 2018.

To sit in silence

“When we see someone again after many years, we should sit down facing each other and say nothing for hours, so that by means of silence our consternation can relish itself.”
E. M. Cioran. The Trouble With Being Born. (1973)(Trans. by Richard Howard.) New York: Arcade, 2012.

To enlarge your community

“In The Spirit of Intimacy, the Burkinabé writer and teacher Sobonfu Somé wrote that in Dagara knowledge systems, ‘Each of us is seen as a spirit who has taken the form of a human in order to carry out a purpose. Spirit is the energy that helps us connect, that helps us see beyond our racially limited parameters.’”
Minna Salami. Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach For Everyone. Amistad, 2020. Chapter 4. “Of Identity.”

To intrigue and inspire you with their solitude

"In “The Grape Man,” Crosley reflects on the death of her downstairs neighbor Don, an older, single man who tended an elaborate garden outside his apartment. “To live alone can be a glorious thing. Between jags of crippling loneliness and wretched TV, it’s an education in self-sufficiency, self-actualization and self-tanner. But it is possible to have too many rooms of one’s own,” Crosley remarks, with some regret for never having taken full inventory of this man’s solitude. Don had occupied for her the strange and unlabeled space between the palpable, but mostly passive, affection between neighbors, and the solid, certain affections between actual friends. The essay’s sadness derives not just from Don’s isolation, but from the author’s reminder that nearly everyone we know in some way occupies that same mysterious liminal space."
“The Essays Are Personal. The Truths Are Universal.” Alana Massey. Reviewing Sloane Crosley’s Look Alive Out There. New York Times. April 19, 2018.

"The aspect of me she called 'the hermit' she thought charming — insofar as it was artistic, part of the mysterious charm of artists. The idea of me, her new friend, holed up in a room behind a locked door hunched over a manuscript was titillating — in the abstract, as long as it happened at those times when she did not happen to call and want to chat."
Anneli Rufus. Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto. Da Capo Press, 2003. p. 71.

To have a shared heart

"We [my sister and I] longed for each other mightily but somehow understood that our love was too strong to allow for either one of us to have real relationships with anyone else, and that it was probably best that we live in separate cities. We still shared a conjoined psycho-spiritual system, where we found ourselves changing in tandem ways throughout our life."
But on this particular Sunday morning, Faith wasn’t answering the phone.
Jill Soloway. She Wants It: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy. Crown, 2018.

Quotes on friendship, especially political friendship

“...it strikes me [that] the more accurate labels than "left" and "right" would be "humanist" and "supremacist.”” — A. R. Moxon, Mastodon, August 27, 2023
For more on that, see my Aug 2023 post on this Disruptive Dissertation blog: On political nostalgia and the voice of self-described civility

Danielle Allen describes the similarities between friendship and democracy. "Friendship is not an emotion, but a practice," she says, "a set of hard-won, complicated habits that are used to bridge trouble, difficulty, and differences of personality, experience, and aspiration." Friends have "a shared life...with common events, climates, built-environments, fixations of the imagination, and social structures." And so, too, democracy. Each of us has "an individual perspective on a set of phenomena relevant to all. Some live behind one veil, and others behind another, but the air that we all breathe carries the same gases and pollens through those veils. More important, our shared elements (events, climates, environments, imaginative fixations, economic conditions, and social structures), when considered at the political rather than the private level, are made out of the combination of all our interactions with each other." Think about the historical significance, assuming that this "shared life, recorded as history, will be the only artifact we leave behind." Recognizing this, we can embark on "political friendship." This will lead to a recognition that "a core citizenly responsibility is to prove oneself trustworthy to fellow citizens so that we are better able to ensure that we all breathe healthy air." That will necessitate a difficult self-examination: "one has to know why one is distrusted. The politics of friendship requires of citizens a capacity to attend to the dark side of the democratic soul."
[An excerpt from Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. (2006). The book is available on Bookshop.]

Bob Marley said: "Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you: You just gotta find the ones worth suffering for." From this, one may suppose that the ethical task may be to become one for whom others find it worthwhile to suffer, even if you occasionally or inevitably hurt them.
[Bob Marley, quoted in IBTimes.com, quoted in The Week, Oct. 28, 2016. p. 19.]"

The plague, in Albert Camus' story of that name, kills people's capacity for love and friendship. After all, he explains, that capacity "asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.”
[Albert Camus, The Plague, Part Three. Translated by Stuart Gilbert (1948). New York: Vintage, 1991. p. 182.]

“How odd that we must live in the present and yet be largely judged by what is yet to be, that as our biological vitality begins to ebb we should still be expected to rise to our best. And yet just this ongoing press for spiritual fulfillment allows us at any moment to turn from continuing to live as we should not have and now, at this new moment, begin to be the self we ought always to have been. For the Transcendent makes Its claim anew at every instant and waits for us to seize the moment to make the past right and culminate our lives in faithfulness to It."
[Eugene B. Borowitz. Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew. (1991) Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996. p. 94.]

"To love someone from the moment of his death: is that friendship?"
Edouard Levé, Suicide, quoted as an epigraph to Candace Jane Opper. Certain and Impossible Events. Tucson, Arizona: Kore Press, 2021.]

Perhaps not. Perhaps friendship requires more.

“Love demands infinitely less than friendship.”
[The critic George Jean Nathan, quoted in the Associated Press. Quoted in The Week. May 13, 2011. p. 19.]

"As rare as true love is, true friendship is still rarer."
[Francois de La 'Rochefoucauld, 1613-1680, quoted by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p 29.]

'To win' and 'to be free, safe, thriving'

"...the fight we’re in is difficult, and winning it requires answering difficult questions. On the left and really across political media a lot of people want your anger. They want your clicks, fueled by and your rage. And I’ve been determined to not just give you rage-bait. I don’t want you to just click and share in your frustration and fury and then go about your day. I want to win. I want us to be free, safe, thriving. And I want us to build that world together. That takes difficult things and complex answers. Sometimes, it takes conflict."
— "Writing Controversy," Joshua P. Hill, New Means, Feb 6, 2024

Quotes on our relationships with money and our relationships with people

Andrew Potter:

“Cars are an almost perfect metaphor for the pervasive atomism that denies the very existence of the webs of interdependence that make civil society possible.”

Henry D. Thoreau:

"It is a grand fact that you cannot make the fairer fruits or parts of fruits matter of commerce, that is, you cannot buy the highest use and enjoyment of them. You cannot buy that pleasure which it yields to him who truly plucks it. You cannot buy a good appetite even. In short, you may buy a servant or slave, but you cannot buy a friend."

David Callahan:

"The great promise of consumer culture – promoted around the clock by $150 billion a year in advertising – is that we need never be discomforted or inconvenienced; that we need never put any him or burning desire on the back burner, or accept anything less than an optimal experience; that we always have more choices, new choices, better choices.

Whatever else you may say about consumerism, whether you’re pro-mall or anti-mall, one thing is certain: This outlook is fundamentally at odds with the vows of marriage and the realities of parenthood. In even the best family life we are often discomforted and inconvenienced, and we are stuck with what we have – the jock we married when we were twenty-four and just a kid, the children who share our blood but not our temperament, the in-laws whom we might happily send on a cruise around the world. Family may be about any number of things; unlimited choice is not one of them."

Alfred DePew:

"Consider this. What if we treated our lovers the way we treated money? Imagine periods of wild, passionate attention, obsession even. Then nothing. ("You never call. You never write!") Neglect. Irresponsibility. Avoidance. Followed by periods of remorse, resolving to do better. Balance the checkbook. Be more mindful of spending. No more debt. And even if your relationship to money is not this dramatic, chances are it's inconsistent and a cause of worry. In short: an energy drain."

Francis P. Cholle:

Experts say that no other generation [in the United States] has ever mentioned time and flexibility among their first three motivators. Millennials' approach to life is more personal and subjective and takes precedence over what we would see as the rule of the game: money. They have reconceptualized money; it is for them just one currency among many that are available to get them the things and experiences that they value. For example, in the preceding list, millennials say that time and flexibility are more important than money when seeking employment. Time and flexibility are currencies to be weighed in the same way as money when they think about compensation for their work.

Sources

“Walking the Line.” Andrew Potter. Adbusters, June-July 2000. p. 79.

David Callahan. The Moral Center: How We Can Reclaim our Country from Die-Hard Extremists, Rogue Corporations, Hollywood Hacks, and Pretend Patriots. USA: Harcourt, 2006. pp. 35-36.

Henry D. Thoreau. “Wild Fruits.” Printed in Faith in a Seed: The First Publication of Thoreau’s Last Manuscript. Edited by Bradley P. Dean. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993. p. 182.

Alfred DePew. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Money." White Crane Journal, Issue #64, Spring 2005, p 22.

Francis P. Cholle. The Intuitive Compass: Why the Best Decisions Balance Reason and Instinct. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012. p. 209.