Bally > Bally's Quotes

“The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a run-away milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the D-Day Invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest-stop on I-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald’s French fries on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye.
But more important than any of these was the vast, accretive weight of small things, from planes which hadn’t crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that weren’t random, ten thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness. He saw the old people of River Crossing and Roland kneeling in the dust for Aunt Talitha’s blessing; again heard her giving it freely and gladly. Heard her telling him to lay the cross she had given him at the foot of the Dark Tower and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth. He saw the Tower itself in the burning folds of the rose and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that were and held them steady in time’s great helix. For every brick that landed on the ground instead of some little kid’s head, for every tornado that missed the trailer park, for every missile that didn’t fly, for every hand stayed from violence, there was the Tower.
And the quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.”
― Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla

“Friends are a strange, volatile, contradictory, yet sticky phenomenon. They are made, crafted, shaped, molded, created by focused effort and intent. And yet, true friendship, once recognized, in its essence is effortless.

Best friends are formed by time.

Everyone is someone's friend, even when they think they are all alone.

If the friendship is not working, your heart will know. It's when you start being less than perfectly honest and perfectly earnest in your dealings. And it's when the things you do together no longer feel right.

However, sometimes it takes more effort to make it work after all.

Stick around long enough to become someone's best friend.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Please, let them be little,
‘Cause they’re only that way for a while.
Give them hope, give them praise,
Give them love every day.
Let ‘em cry, let ‘em giggle,
Let ‘em sleep in the middle,
Oh, but let them be little.”
― Billy Dean

“The path of development is a journey of discovery that is clear only in retrospect, and it’s rarely a straight line.”
― Eileen Kennedy-Moore, Smart Parenting for Smart Kids: Nurturing Your Child's True Potential

“Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.”
― William James

“There are women who make things better... simply by showing up. There are women who make things happen. There are women who make their way. There are women who make a difference. And women who make us smile. There are women of wit and wisdom who- through strength and courage- make it through. There are women who change the world everyday... Women like you.”
― Ashley Rice

“‎Lipstick is really magical. It holds more than a waxy bit of color - it holds the promise of a brilliant smile, a brilliant day, both literally and figuratively.”
― Roberta Gately

“Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics: The Annotated

“Kid, don't miss an opportunity to laugh, because laughter is what makes the boot heels of life palatable.”
― Bryan R. Dennis, Isle of Stumps

“The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days.”
― Sue Monk Kidd

“I read because one life isn't enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody;
I read because the words that build the story become mine, to build my life;
I read not for happy endings but for new beginnings; I'm just beginning myself, and I wouldn't mind a map;
I read because I have friends who don't, and young though they are, they're beginning to run out of material;
I read because every journey begins at the library, and it's time for me to start packing;
I read because one of these days I'm going to get out of this town, and I'm going to go everywhere and meet everybody, and I want to be ready.”
― Richard Peck, Anonymously Yours

“There is always the temptation in life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for years on end. It is all so self conscience, so apparently moral...But I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous...more extravagant and bright. We are...raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.”
― Annie Dillard

“A good friend who points out mistakes and imperfections and rebukes evil is to be respected as if he reveals the secret of some hidden treasure.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“Chocolate is like my best friend and the most intense pleasure at the same time, perhaps not the most intense, but the most regular and reliable one.”
― Chloe Doutre-Roussel

“She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
― Toni Morrison

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
― Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

“I think if I've learned anything about friendship, it's to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don't walk away, don't be distracted, don't be too busy or tired, don't take them for granted. Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together. Powerful stuff.”
― Jon Katz

“The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“No friendship is an accident. ”
― O. Henry, Heart of the West

“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.”
― Khalil Gibran, Kahlil Gibran, The Collected Works

“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

“Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“There are times when friendship feels like running down a hill together as fast as you can, jumping over things, spinning around, and you don't care where you're going, and you don't care where you've come from, because all that matters is speed, and the hands holding your hands.”
― M.T. Anderson, Whales on Stilts: M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales

“Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it.”
― C.S. Lewis

“i have a friend request from some stranger on facebook and i delete it without looking at the profile because that doesn't seem natural. 'cause friendship should not be as easy as that. it's like people believe all you need to do is like the same bands in order to be soulmates. or books. omg... U like the outsiders 2... it's like we're the same person! no we're not. it's like we have the same english teacher. there's a difference.”
― David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.”
― W.Somerset Maugham

“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory