Rules for Visiting Quotes

“It seems to me that your oldest friends can offer a glimpse of who you were from a time before you had a sense of yourself.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Because certain things only come into focus when a person is gone. It’s sad but true. You need memory and loss to polish your thoughts.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Perhaps a best friend is someone who... holds the story of your life in mind. Sometimes in music a melodic line is so beautiful the notes feel inevitable; you can anticipate the next note through the long rest. Maybe that is friendship. A best friend holds your story in mind so notes don't have to be repeated.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“I'm aware not everyone feels the way I do about trees, but I have no idea why not.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Did you know people will underestimate the weight of a heavy backpack before climbing a steep hill if they're standing next to a friend?"
"Aww," Neera said. "That's nice."
I looked out the window. Every stripped tire looked like roadkill.
After a minute, Neera said, "Actually, that really is something."
"I thought so," I said.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Neighbor seems to me a flexible word. You can say "She's my neighbor." and people will think you mean she's your friend. But if something goes wrong, you can say, "Oh I don't really know her. She's just my neighbor," and everyone still knows what you mean.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“When a friend is suffering, it seems you have three options: You can sit silently with her, you can make suggestions, or you can share heartache from your own life. None of the three is as simple as it sounds. I knew someone in college who was so full of advice it was exhausting to share problems with her. You left with a small treatise of self-improvement ideas and the urge to lie down.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“But you're sure we're not being slothful?"
I told her avarice, envy, pride, lust, and wrath harm others, and gluttony is bad for your health. But sloth is just a willingness to move slower than others and that's not a crime. I've always thought despair should be the seventh deadly sin instead.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“How can we live in a time when social media makes us friends with people all over the world, but our sense of neighbor is shrinking?”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“I don't know why people start thank you notes with the word 'just'. Just a quick note to thank you for a wonderful time. Just wanted to say thanks for everything. It reduces expecations right from the start. It says: I understand the importance of saying thank you, but I won't be writing a letter. It says: I'd like to follow the best social conventions, but I won't be spending that much time on it. I've even seen stationery that has "Just a note" printed on the front. If you start there, why write the note at all? Consider the synonyms: merely, barely. Would you write: barely a note to thank you for the visit? Merely a hasty parargaph to acknowledge all you did for me?”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“People feel sorry for the housebound, but it can be a position of strength, a refusal to meet the world on its terms... The recluse decides when and to whom she will speak, access is limited.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“We live in a time when everyone gets a medal and all villains have heartbreaking backstories. No one thinks evil is intrinsic anymore, just someone making a really bad choice.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Quite simply: Without friendship, you become Grendel. Many people don’t marry and many don’t have children. Some people might not know their mother or father, and a lot of people don’t have siblings. But any person who has lived for any length of time has had a friend. Except Grendel, and he became the first monster in English literature.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward. I was tipped backward and wobbly, my balance was off, and this made sense to me. A life seemed so long, I couldn't see how anyone proceeded under the accumulated weight of it.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Allegedly warmth, cheeriness, friendliness and strength are distinct from one another and your likability is largely determined by how much of each you project. The definition of warmth is how easily you convey you have something in common with another person.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Love stands apart; love lets you come to it.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“When we were finished eating, I showed Leo some of the other campus gardens. At the crescent rose bed, I stopped to smell a floribunda rose. Leo waited, then leaned over to smell the exact same flower, as if, despite all the blooms around us, I had found the best one.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Perhaps a best friend is someone who . . . holds the story of your life in mind. Sometimes in music a melodic line is so beautiful the notes feel inevitable; you can anticipate the next note through a long rest. Maybe that is friendship. A best friend holds your story in mind so notes don’t have to be repeated.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“I was interested in figuring out who I was with other people, and why that person was hard to be. I remember my mother, not a great keeper of friends herself, used to say, “If you’re comfortable with yourself, you’ll never be lonely,” which didn’t feel like the whole story.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Is it real? I once asked Amber. What? she said. Your life! The things that happen to you. Is it real or are you just really good at making it all into stories? She said, I don’t understand the difference.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“She was the kind of person who had multiple copies of the books she loved most. That way, she said, she could always give one away.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Better to take the train, where I can watch the trees rush by, though so many were in bad shape from pruning and storms, they started to make me sad, Do trees regret their lot? The ones in cities or growing along forgotten margins? Do they dream of dark nights and quiet forests?”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“It seems the trees' plight is to always be underappreciated by humans while working the hardest of any plant on earth for them. We cut them down, we poison them, we introduce disease and destructive pests. But we also plant them when someone is born, we plant them when someone dies. We want them to measure and commemorate our lives, even as the way we live hurts them.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Many people don't marry and many don't have children. Some people might not know their mother or father, and a lot of people don't have siblings. But any person who has lived for any length of time has had a friend.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“She was very opinionated, but everyone seemed to agree that the opinions were well informed, insightful, and usually for the benefit of someone else’s problem.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“I told her avarice, envy, pride, lust, and wrath harm others, and gluttony is bad for your health. But sloth is just a willingness to move slower than others and that’s not a crime. I’ve always thought despair should be the seventh deadly sin instead.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness (Euripides)”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Settle. The word gives me pause...I suppose what you are reading is my attempt to settle. There's a story I've been trying to tell, one about friendship and friends and what place they have in life, and one I've been trying not to tell about my family. Does that make me an unreliable narrator? To a certain extent, aren't we all? We don't get to write from scratch the whole story of our lives. We are given certain plot points that must be incorporated. Maybe we settle when we've done the best we can.

Is it real? I once asked Amber. What? she said. Your life. The things that happen to you. Is it real or are you just really good at making it all into stories? She said, I don't understand the difference.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“When little, friends play house in order to pretend to be family, which is ironic because the beautify of friends is that they are chosen, not given. Should siblings, play friends? And so we 'make' friends or 'find' them? Emily Dickinson thought that the best verb was 'enact'.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“Sometime in her forties, my mother stopped moving forward. Somehow when we weren't looking, she must have curtsied, performed a little shuffle sidestep, and exited stage right. In retrospect, she'd been rehearsing for some time. She went up to bed often without saying good night, or stayed home from family outings with ambiguous symptoms.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting