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It was in these moments that he loved JB completely, his ability and willingness to be wholly silly and frivolous,
Could you have a real friendship if some part of you was always expecting betrayal?
He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.
“If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully. “Actually—maybe I am that kind of person after all. “Love, Harold.”
He already knew why they had happened: they had happened because he had deserved them.
Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.
It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them.
“I know,” he said. “I know, Willem. I feel the same way.” “I love you,” said Willem, and then he was gone before he had to respond.
Let me celebrate this thing that has happened to me just this once.
the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.
He had always taken pride in the fact that he was a good friend; friendship had always been important to him. But was he actually any good at it?
It was sometimes incredible to him how much he cared about someone who refused to tell him any of the things friends shared with each other—how
He knew it was romantic, but he admired them: he admired anyone who could live for year after year on only their fastburning hopes, even as they grew older and more obscure with every day.
He had never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship.
The first time Caleb hit him, he was both surprised and not.
No one else in his life needed him. People wanted him—for sex, for their projects, for his friendship, even—but only Jude needed him. Only to Jude was he essential.
What’s missing in you that you want someone else to provide? He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.
How can he willingly cut away a part of himself?
