37 Quotes by Jessica Francis Kane

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Halfway through life, I wasn’t sure what I’d made.

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.

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’.

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.