The Friendship Cure Quotes

“And then there are those friends who aren’t really friends at all. For some reason, we all have them. They don’t belong in our lives, not really, not truly, not if we’re honest with ourselves. But we keep them there out of fear and complacency. At best, they slightly upset the equilibrium of our life every time we make contact with them — at worst, they steal from our sense of self-worth until we have nothing left. We cling to these inappropriate friends — people who are incapable of good friendship, people who have drifted from our lives or people we’ve outgrown — because we believe we have no choice, because we are too frightened of the confrontation required to erase them from our lives, or because we suspect we might deserve them. Everyone, at some stage in her life, has kept an unworthy friend around for the sake of convenience, cowardice or that private, but necessary sense of belonging. Any friend is better than no friends, we think. The more, the better. Any company is better than solitude.”
― Kate Leaver, The Friendship Cure

“We need to relearn the art of friendship because we need each other more than ever. The only way we can end this era of acute loneliness is to start a new era of proper, loving, restorative camaraderie between human beings. That means prioritising friends in our lives. It means deliberately, brazenly choosing who deserves to be in our lives in the first place. It means investing time and energy into people outside our own families and marriages. It means compassion for people who’ve lost their way. It means kindness and action for asylum seekers and the disenfranchised on a political level. It means a wilful revival of empathy above things like professional success, ambition and profit.”
― Kate Leaver, The Friendship Cure