Stuart Miller > Quotes

“But we Americans scrap relationships that are not working as we would like -- whether they be with relatives, with spouses, or with friends. We dispose of them like Kleenex. When it is inconvenient, painful, difficult, I get rid of you. I hit the road.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“To realize the importance the imagination could have in friendship, to understand its immense power for bringing us together in a way.”
― Stuart Miller

“After all, what is ''a man'' nowadays? Somebody who stands alone, independent of all ties.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“Our attitudes toward human relationships are those of supermarket shoppers: we want what is cheap and quick and easy; we want variety; and we want novelty. But friendship requires a whole other set of mind.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“Innocence revived is the freshening rain of life on dead and wintered fields.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“Being shameless in thinking, then talking, about male friendship because it is important. Make room for friendship in your life. Make a federal case out of it.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“Our society seems to say that a real man needs and wants nobody.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“For love, we've got to be alone, together. We've got to close out everyone else.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“But since the time of Leibnitz, it is hard to find philosophers who stress relatedness in any way. There is Henri Bergson, and before him the romantics, and Marx with his talk of the brotherhood of revolution, and Martin Buber with his I and Thou, but by and large modern philosophy is about aloneness. We are forlorn, abandoned.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“Frequently, friendship is represented as something too steadily pleasant, or in certain of the masterpieces of the past -- Aristotle and Cicero, for example -- as pervaded by a constant mutual understanding and a gentle calm. Friendship is also an emotional relationship, with involvement that can get hot at times, like any other deep involvement with a person.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship