The enduring bonds of long friendships often start out as simple connections. Whether they’re forged in childhood, at school, at work, or through mutual connections or hobbies, those connections evolve into something deeper over time, fortified by shared memories, laughter, tears, and countless conversations.
These long-lasting friendships can feel like priceless treasures, but they also require effort. Maintaining contact, making time for one another, and celebrating milestones together are essential — as is allowing space when other aspects of our lives inevitably demand our attention.
Although life’s challenges can test the strength of these bonds, true friends weather the storms together. In the end, long friendships endure because they give us roots, keep us grounded, and, of course, infuse our lives with joy, support, and a sense of belonging. They remind us that human connections are invaluable, and with care, they can last a lifetime.
Old friends are the great blessing of one's latter years — half a word conveys one's meaning.Horace Walpole
When we’re together the years fall away. Isn’t that what matters? To have someone who can remember with you? To have someone who remembers how far you’ve come?Judy Blume
True friendship resists time, distance, and silence.Isabel Allende
The companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds, which hardly any later friend can obtain.Mary Shelley
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
She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was an incomparable richness in it.Alice Walker
We have been sad together, / We have wept, with bitter tears / O’er the grass-grown graves, where slumber’d / The hopes of early years. / … / We have been sad together — / Oh! what shall part us now?Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton
“We’ll be friends forever, won’t we, Pooh?” asked Piglet. “Even longer,” Pooh answered.A.A. Milne
We could fight and wrangle and name-call, but it didn’t change anything underneath. She was still my oldest friend. Is.Margaret Atwood
Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound … only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.Hanya Yanagihara
The best kind of laughter is laughter born of a shared memory.Mindy Kaling
Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling … 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 … from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?C.S. Lewis
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