Love and Salt Quotes

“Perfect joy could not be joy alone but must be a joy that somehow contains our past grief and sadness and longing.”
― Amy Alznauer, Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters

“There is one story about letters. A perpetually cheerful Frog pays a visit to Toad but finds Toad glum, sitting on his front porch.
"This is my sad time of day," says Toad, "when I wait for the mail to come."
"Why is that?" says Frog.
"No one has ever sent me a letter. My mailbox is always empty. That is why waiting for the mail is a sad time for me."
Then Frog and Toad sit "on the porch, feeling sad together."
Frog rescues the situation by running home, writing a letter to Toad, and sending it literally by snail mail. The little snail brings it four days later.
Even though Toad saw Frog every day, he longed for the strangeness, the otherness of a letter, for something to come from out there and address him, "Dear Toad." Is that the thrill I feel finding a letter from you in my box? The address of a friend is made into a physical fact and every letter an artifact of the otherwise invisible communion of friendship.”
― Amy Alznauer, Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters

“My dad has always told me that all feelings of peace come from the Lord and all anxiety from the enemy. I think I might alter that statement slightly to say that peace comes from abandonment to providence, while anxiety comes from my determination to wrench providence according to my own desires.”
― Amy Alznauer, Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters

“I have been so afraid that our friendship will not survive Clare's death. I can sense this in your voice, too, when we talk. . . .

When I talk to Mark about this, he tries to console me with Aristotle (I hope you are smiling). Aristotle, he tells me, describes three types of friendship: friendship based on utility, on pleasure, and on virtue (the pursuit of good). The third type is the highest and most stable form. Mark says that we pursue the good, and that sharing new motherhood alone could not possibly replace that.

Maybe right now we are confusing our friendship with a friendship of pleasure, since we have given each other so much of it (hilarity and clogs and dreams of Italy). And we are worried since these friendships fade when pleasure fades (and Clare has taken so much pleasure with her). But surely that's not all we've shared.

The highest friendship, Aristotle wrote, 'requires time and familiarity; for, as the proverb says, it is impossible for men to know each other well until they have consumed together much salt, nor can they accept each other and be friends till each has shown himself dear and trustworthy to the other.' I guess we are now in the phase of eating much salt. . . .

I am not sure what it means to eat much salt, but it doesn't sound pleasant. It makes me think of tears rolling down our faces into our mouths. . . .

Yet this time is not merely that. When I see you or read your letters, I am suddenly made happy. I see that I still love you, take pleasure in your ways, and yearn for your good and for mine. If this load of salt can’t kill our pleasure or desire for good, then I doubt anything can. And maybe this very salt will make us all the more dear and trustworthy to each other.

With much love and salt,
Amy”
― Amy Alznauer, Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters

“Whither thou goest, I will go. Thy God shall be my God. We were praying together for the first time, though we hardly realized it. In these two women—removed from us by centuries and cultures—we received a vision of friendship, a way of walking with each other toward God. But we could never have imagined the path we were starting down together. A few weeks later, we left Pittsburgh: Jess for South Bend, Indiana, where she took a job at Notre Dame writing thank you letters to high-ticket donors; and Amy for Chicago, to return to”
― Amy Andrews, Love & Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters

“Sometimes all I want or need is someone to tell me I'm strong. Somehow it makes me strong just to hear it.”
― Jessica Mesman Griffith, Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters

“Why is it that grief feels so much like fear? It seems anything could happen now and will likely happen. God seems inscrutable and hidden. How could we ever understand or know him?”
― Jessica Mesman Griffith, Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters

“Maybe I've had it all wrong, and it's not that I have to love God more than my family but simply come to see that my love of my family - past, present, and future - is a sign of the even greater love of God, which governs all.”
― Jessica Mesman Griffith, Love and Salt: A Spiritual Friendship Shared in Letters