Quotes on Sacrifice

Thornton Wilder's character Manuel questioned whether "we ever sacrifice anything save what we know we can never attain, or what some secret wisdom tells us it would be uncomfortable or saddening to possess."

Arjun Appadurai said:

"But what is the special status of such scapegoats in the era of globalization? After all, strangers, sick people, nomads, religious dissidents, and similar minor social groups have always been targets of prejudice and xenophobia. Here I suggest a single and simple hypothesis. Given the systemic compromise of national economic sovereignty that is built into the logic of globalization, and given the increasing strain this puts on states to behave as trustees of the interests of a territorially defined and confined 'people,' minorities are the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few megastates, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties."

And, Chris Walsh:

"The wish to avoid the imputation of cowardice has led many to do their duty to the larger group, even the most awful duty of killing and being killed. In his study of the motivation of American Civil War soldiers, James M. McPherson notes that in their letters home men ‘wrote much about cowardice because they worried they might be guilty of it, and they desperately wanted to avoid the shame of being known as a coward—and that is what gave them courage.

In a similar vein Horace follows his famous testament to patriotic courage—‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country)—with far less famous but no less important lines:

mors et fugacem persequitur virum
nec parcit imbellis iuventae
poplitibus timidove tergo
[death hunts down also the man who runs away
and has no mercy on the hamstrings of the unwarlike youth
and his cowardly back]

The ancient Roman poet operates on the same principle as the Union and Confederate soldiers do: the shame of cowardice reinforces the call for sacrifice.

Exactly, says the other side in this debate: that is the problem. Shaming people into sacrifice has caused uncountable horrors."

Brooker Buckingham writes:

"[George] Bataille's theory of sacrifice follows a similar logic. For Bataille, sacrifice is founded on destruction — its originary, mythical gesture was to remove plants and animals from the world of things, placing them in an intimate relation with a divine world that is, at the same time, immanent to the world of things. 'Sacrifice turns its back on real relations.'"

Buckingham continues:

"For de Raïs, sacrifice was the corrupt practice of 'meontology' — the desire to burn being and reduce it to non-being. De Raïs was void of the sacred, emptied of the intimate, an auteur producing snuff films, projected within the harrowing confines of his skull-cramped Cartesian theatre."

Sources

Thornton Wilder. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. (1927) New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1960. p. 53.

Arjun Appadurai. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. p. 43.

Chris Walsh. Cowardice: A Brief History. Princeton University Press, 2014. p. 10.

Brooker Buckingham. "Gulp of Sun: Rethinking Sacrifice Through Bataille's Gilles de Raïs." In Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology. Edia Connole and Gary J. Shipley, eds. Schism, 2015. p. 80, 89. The Bataille quote, according to Buckingham, is from The Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (Boston: Zone Books, 1989), 77.

G. M. Cumming taught law with Burdick, Kirchwey, and Moore

One of the things about writing a biography is knowing when to stop. I published Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty in 2020, but I keep learning things about Edward Dilworth Cumming and his family.

Image by noriyuki yagi from Pixabay

Just now, online, I found a news brief from the Tunkhannock Republican (Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania), 10 Apr 1891. p. 2.

This newspaper issue announced that the showman P.T. Barnum had died the previous evening. The column to the left of the news brief has the Barnum obituary.

I did already know that George Miller Cumming had been appointed Professor of Law on April 6, 1891, reappointed on April 2, 1894 and resigned effective June 30, 1897. From this news brief, however, I learn that he had three colleagues at least for his first year: Francis Marion Burdick (who was on an anti-vice squad, the Committee of Fourteen, in New York City), George Washington Kirchwey, and John Bassett Moore. It is interesting to me that today, in 2023, G. M. Cumming is the only one who doesn't have a Wikipedia page. He wasn't notable enough.

Another thing I've learned is that when Ben "Felix" Kittredge reported playing a game called "Canfield" with the Canfield family, it wasn't a game they'd made up and named after the Canfields (as I assumed). George Folger Canfield was married to G. M. Cumming's wife's sister, Sarah Kittredge, and after Sarah died, he married back into the Kittredge family. There's a solitaire card game called Canfield, named after Richard Albert Canfield (1855–1914). He ran a casino in Saratoga Springs, New York, and in the first few years of the 20th century, he ran a card game he called Klondike. A similar game is today called Canfield in the United States and Demon Patience in the UK. Canfield died after falling and hitting his head in the New York City Subway station on 14th Street.

You can learn more about G. M. Cumming and especially his son, Edward Dilworth Cumming, in Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty.

Cumming was interested in Cuba, and his son Ned ended up spending time in Tampico, Mexico, probably while working for Stone & Webster. Regarding what Stone & Webster was doing in Tampico, this source may have something to say.

Ninety-eight years after his death, in July 2025, the Union Pacific railroad announced its plan "to acquire Norfolk Southern Railway, which, if approved by the US Surface Transportation Board (STB), would make the new entity the largest railroad company in American history, controlling over 50,000 total miles of interstate rail." (Common Dreams)

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write on Medium.

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The alef, the glyphs, what's here, or what we're really looking for

On what goes on with an alef:

"'It says you’re my cousin,' said Little Ash, quite pleased with himself. 'And your name is Uriel Federman. See here, your eyes are brown and you’re a man. Like a human person. And you’re a Jew, of course.'

The angel took the papers back. The rest of the letters it did not understand, but Uriel at least was written as it would be in Hebrew. It was not sure how it felt about having such a thing as a name attached to itself. A single, solid name, that is, written in the letters with which the whole world was once written. There was something about the alef at the beginning that made it feel a little dizzy. You never quite knew what was going on with an alef."

— Sacha Lamb. When the Angels Left the Old Country. Levine Querido, 2022.

How the glyphs talk:

"Babuta say to the man, Watch me now, no man here ever wished to read, and the man say, You will know when you see the glyphs, for the glyphs talk like the world."

— Marlon James. Black Leopard, Red Wolf. New York: Riverhead, 2019. Chapter 17.

Is it already here?

"What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, in experiments and possibilities."

— Ruth Wilson Gilmore, quoted as the epigraph to Destiny Hemphill's motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life

On what you're really looking for:

"Upon arrival, the soldiers took me to a side area, where a chaplain came by to see me. 'Do you need spiritual help?' he asked. I couldn’t think of anything I desired less in that moment. What I really wanted was a cheeseburger..."

— Chelsea Manning, ReadMe.txt. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

Magical realism: Reality invaded by the unbelievably strange

Literary magic realism originated in Latin America. English Wikipedia today describes it:

"Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier and Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, for example, were strongly influenced by European artistic movements, such as Surrealism, during their stays in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. One major event that linked painterly and literary magic realisms was the translation and publication of Franz Roh's book into Spanish by Spain's Revista de Occidente in 1927, headed by major literary figure José Ortega y Gasset. "Within a year, Magic Realism was being applied to the prose of European authors in the literary circles of Buenos Aires." Jorge Luis Borges inspired and encouraged other Latin American writers in the development of magical realism – particularly with his first magical realist publication, Historia universal de la infamia in 1935. Between 1940 and 1950, magical realism in Latin America reached its peak, with prominent writers appearing mainly in Argentina. Alejo Carpentier's novel The Kingdom of This World, published in 1949, is often characterised as an important harbinger of magic realism, which reached its most canonical incarnation in Gabriel García Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)."

Read more on Spanish Wikipedia.

At the beginning of the series Narcos, a definition of magical realism:

"...what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe."

This definition comes from Strecher, Matthew C. 1999. "Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki." Journal of Japanese Studies 25(2):263–98. p. 267.

"¿cómo se construye la ciencia ficción en un lugar donde los conceptos hegemónicos de ciencia no coinciden con los que se han construido en nuestras culturas? * * * Las principales negaciones que se implantan sobre la ciencia ficción latinoamericana están dictadas por la forma en la que se ha entendido la anglosajona y europea; por ello se suele decir que en Latinoamérica NO se habla realmente de ciencia, que NO hay ciencia ficción sino fantástico, que NO hay una identidad consolidada como en otros lugares, y otras tesis del mismo perfil. * * * Concibamos un mundo en el que gracias a los conjuros del ciberchamanismo y los futuros andinos espaciales, ahora los guacamayos vuelen entre galaxias, canten himnos espacio-temporales y embellezcan con sus colores a nuestra madre universo." — Rodrigo Bastidas Pérez, prólogo a la antología El tercer mundo después del sol

On the ritual fire

The Roma,

“who have lived in Prague for only two generations, light a ritual fire wherever they work, a nomads’ fire crackling only for the joy of it, a blaze of rough-hewn wood like a child’s laugh, a symbol of the eternity that preceded human thought, a free fire, a gift from heaven, a living sign of the elements unnoticed by the world-weary pedestrian, a fire in the ditches of Prague warming the wanderer’s eye and soul.”

Bohumil Hrabal. Too Loud a Solitude (Příliš hlučná samota) 1976. Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim. Abacus (Little, Brown Book Group), 1990. p. 42.

“In his 1967 article ‘Shamans and Acute Schizophrenia,’ a central source for the McKennas… Silverman then outlines a multi-phase model of pathologic experience that, up to a certain point, characterizes both schizophrenics and shamans. Drawing from the hero’s journey structure popularly articulated by Joseph Campbell, Silverman describes the earlier stages of this process as a descent into psychological chaos, a regressive state characterized by automatisms, archaic ideation, and encounters with transpersonal forces. This descent is then followed, most of the time, by a ‘cognitive reorganization.’ * * * Here [at the sealed Institute on the Big Sur coast] Silverman worked on one of Esalen’s main agendas: to rewrite insanity as an episodic process of psychic reorganization that follows the same death-and-rebirth model found, it was believed, in both esoteric initiations and deep psychedelic experience.”

Erik Davis. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2019.

“Newness...is precisely the return from left-hemisphere familiarity to right-hemisphere familiarity, from inauthenticity to authenticity. It cannot be willed, though it might be much desired; it requires an (apparently passive) patient openness to whatever is, which allows us to see it as if for the very first time, and leads to what Heidegger called radical “astonishment” before the world. That concept is also related to Jan Patocka’s shakiness: a sort of elemental driving out of the complacency of our customary modes of seeing the world. … It involves reconnection with the world which familiarity had veiled. It is at the furthest remove from the need to shock: it requires looking more carefully at what seems only too familiar, and seeing it perhaps for the very first time.”

And, in a footnote:

"Jan Patocka (1907–77) was an important Czech phenomenological philosopher, active in the Charter 77 human rights movement. He spoke of the “solidarity of the shaken”, at one level an affirmation of the power and determination of those who have suffered political oppression, but at another a recognition of the resolve born of a different kind of suffering, in those for whom the comfortable familiarity of the apparently known no longer disguises the sheer “awe-full-ness” of Being — what Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Otto, 1923). Thus Andrew Shanks writes of “those who have been shaken, especially by the experience of great historic trauma, out of lie “within a lie” — or, in general, out of the unquestioned prejudices of their culture — into a genuinely open-minded thoughtfulness. This is not the thoughtfulness of scholarly expertise; but, rather, that other sort of thoughtfulness (to be found at all different levels of scholarly sophistication or articulacy) which may also be described as a fundamental openness to transcendence” (Shanks, 2000, p. 5)."

Iain McGilchrist. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009.

"Regret for the past is not the same as nostalgia. Pretending it is [the same] has always been the first and cheapest move of the present’s apologists. Regretting the past is...a way of steeling oneself for the fact that the past really is lost, and therefore maybe having a chance of looking the future accurately in the face."

— T. J. Clark, quoted on Twitter by Jared Marcel Pollen
https://twitter.com/JaredMPollen/status/1670417226489315331

"Time is like an eternal burning bush. Though each instant must vanish to open the way to the next one, time itself is not consumed."

— Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Sabbath (1951). Prologue. Reprint: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

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Bad Fire

a memoir by Tucker Lieberman

On meritocracy and institutions

Four quotes:

"Institutions are formalized mind-sets. These too can be witnessed. To become aware of those sets but see right through them from outside is the most reliable way not to get stuck or burned out by them. We master the rules, but we don’t let them ultimately define us or narrow our field of perception. We encompass the craziness of the situation, so we can be skillful within it or playful when there’s nothing to do but ride through the contradictions. Then we share a sense of the absurd with whoever else is inclined to see it that way. Whoever feels a little lost can find relief in our presence, in our tent, around our desk.
None of this means that we just suspend judgment forever. We observe...but there is action to be taken too. If we are serious in our criticisms of the practices and habits of helping organizations, however, we’ve got to be light, free, and sufficiently above it all to see where we can untangle the knots and bring about change. Everything is always changing anyway. With the perspective of the Witness, we can see just which pressures, applied with the precision of a judo chop, can move the mass."
Ram Dass and Paul Gorman. How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflection on Service. (1985) New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. p. 199-200.

“I think that any form or any way in which you’re not productive is disruption. Anything that takes you out of the system where you are producing something — I don’t mean creating, I don’t mean the things that nurture you and serve you and are generative for you — but when you drop out of the system and you are not productive, it will have consequences. But those consequences are part of the imagination of this system that says that we have to be producing and we have to be making something happen in order for us to have value, in order to effectively know who we are.”
Rev. angel Kyodo williams, in a dialogue in “Radical Dharma: Love.” Printed in Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation. Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2016. p. 140.

"Many people, liberal and conservative alike, are deeply offended by critiques of compulsory schooling. Every day we’re told that schools hold the key to equalizing opportunity, that the proper credentials will allow poor and marginalized people to participate fully in society, and that education provides the only legitimate path out of poverty. The question is a difficult one. Are schools social levelers or do they reinforce the class pyramid by tracking and sorting children from a young age? Presumably they do both."
“Unschooling: Trusting our kids to be curious.” Astra Taylor. Originally in n+1. Reprinted in Utne Reader, Nov-Dec 2013, p. 47.

"Your academic degree and job title do a lot to shape your workplace identity. But you don’t let your fancy credentials go to your head and shape your self-identity. Whenever you have a choice in your interactions with coworkers and clients, and with people in your life outside the workplace, you downplay your formal education and your position within the system, recognizing that it would be elitist to imply that such credentials make you even a bit more deserving of respect than other people. When you identify yourself, you don’t adorn your name with titles such as “Dr.,” “PhD,” “Professor” or “Esq.”
* * *
For if your own degree and job title lend validity to your conclusions, then the paper credentials and positions of your establishment-oriented colleagues lend validity to the opposite conclusions. And there are more of them than there are of you."
Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) Kindle Edition.

Who's leading the charge?

Yes, universities have always been elitist. But sometimes the accusation of elitism is made by someone who isn't qualified to make it or who is hypocritical, and is using it to discredit their political enemies while their intent is to gain power for themselves or their friends. Like U.S. Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska.

Bluesky

The issue, Foust continues, is that "this man has spearheaded a historic crackdown on liberty and speech, while demanding the public supply him with a luxurious lifestyle out of reach to his staff, and condemns other people of decadence. It’s foul that The Atlantic would solicit such a man for comment."

Foust provided these sources:

UF spending $300,000 on new pool for Dasburg home where incoming president Ben Sasse will reside. Emma Behrmann, The Gainesville Sun, January 11, 2023
In Florida’s Hot Political Climate, Some Faculty Have Had Enough. Liberal-leaning professors are leaving coveted jobs with tenure. And there are signs that recruiting scholars has become harder. New York Times. December 3, 2023.
University of Florida prohibits professors from testifying. Mike Schneider, Associated Press, October 30, 2021.
Florida students and professors say a new law censors academic freedom. They’re suing to stop it. Mike Schneider. Associated Press. August 15, 2023

Tom Pepinsky on Bluesky: "You have to read this at the same time that you read about our oligarchs' demands that universities focus exclusively on truth, excellence, and meritocracy." He was referring to this article: "Inventing the Perfect College Applicant: For $120,000 a year, Christopher Rim promises to turn any student into Ivy bait." Caitlin Moscatello, NY Mag Intelligencer, January 29, 2024.

2024: In response to Matthew Yglesias's suggestion that Trump is "really smart and impressive" and is "actually playing" everyone around him who believes they're playing him, in other words, that there's some meritocracy playing out in Trump's orbit, Assigned Media says:

"There's a type of midwit liberal elite for whom meritocracy functions as the psychological justification for their entire existence and if you show those people evidence that some people rise to the top without possessing any merit, they reject it as an ego defense. (Bluesky)

Most of us can accept that, whatever our excellent (or terrible!) personal qualities, a lot of luck went into where we ended up.

But for many at the top that is such an unacceptable conclusion that they will believe literally anything that allows them to avoid confronting the fact. (Bluesky)

I think you can also go too far in the direction of fatalism, and conclude that hard work, passion, and a desire to improve is meaningless.

It's not meaningless, it's actually the primary source of meaning. It just doesn't ensure external success." (Bluesky)

2025: If Trump truly wanted meritocracy, then why did he sign a January 20 executive order that "reclassified potentially tens of thousands of 'policy-influencing' workers in the federal civil service from career jobs into roles where they could be replaced at will for political reasons"? Hmmm? (Trump's America Is in a Free Fall—Not a Slippery Slope—to Tyranny: He is instilling fear not just among lawmakers but every sector of society that dares to criticize him or hold him accountable Larry Diamond, The UnPopulist, Feb 20, 2025)

let me say that this is the classic “just asking questions” approach to delegitimizing the achievements of black people. and critically, you don’t even have to be a black person who talks about race. simply being black to these people means you are “obsessed with race.”

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) February 22, 2025 at 10:07 AM

Bethann Garramon Merkle writes: "For thousands of years, universities were vocational schools that first taught European and Middle Eastern elite men to become clergy (and later lawyers, doctors, etc.)." Then, around the 16th through 18th century, there was nepotistic hiring of poorly paid professors. Universities didn't do research. They were only involved in teaching, and governments decided what could be taught. Then some German philosophers in the mid-18th century, like Kant, got into the idea of "pure knowledge," and scholars began separating out their work into disciplines. Napoleon destroyed Prussian universities, and Prussia rebuilt them in the early 19th century.

Quote:

"By this point the Romantics’ call for research/learning for its own sake, and the expectation for specialized, original research, were driving the bus. In 1810, a new university was established in Berlin, and its function was — uniquely and novelly — to teach men to think critically and seek new knowledge (not “merely” prep for elite careers as was the case in the Enlightenment era and before). This is also when and where the first non-medical doctoral degrees were issued…in philosophy (as we still see for nearly all PhDs today).

There’s plenty more to say about all that. But that sequence then tees us up for the heyday of natural history in Europe, especially the UK. While there was an amateur boom that contributed substantially (e.g., Mary Anning’s fossils, etc.), at some point elite, White men deemed natural history too accessible. Wanting to gatekeep prestige and expertise, they did many things to make science more exclusive. One of these efforts was that they formalized how and where science was presented: in writing, with a supposedly neutral, “objective” tone, presented to exclusive, scientific societies with highly controlled membership. They entrenched the idea that research and methodically uncovered insights could only be valid if they were done and presented dispassionately — and the subtext was that only certain strata of society were capable of this objectivity."

So:

"our book [Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences: An Evidence-Based Approach] is meant to help scientists, who themselves were not trained to write (and largely aren’t trained to teach, either!!!), to:

1. build a vocabulary for talking about writing,
2. understand writing instruction and development as incremental and iterative, and
3. acknowledge and support the deeply emotional aspects of becoming a strong writer."

Amid reports of a long term affair with Corey Lewandowski, Noem thanks her husband for accompanying her to her hearing

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— Nikki McCann Ramírez (@nikkimcr.bsky.social) March 3, 2026 at 9:38 AM

Quotes: 'Time is the context...'

While writing Most Famous Short Film of All Time, I made note of these sentences. They did not work their way into my novel, but they worked their way into me in other ways, and perhaps they'll work into you too.

"Time is the context that gives meaning to everything in this world, and conversely everything that has meaning for us in this world, everything that has a place in our lives, exists in time. This is not true of abstractions and re-presentations of entities, but all that is is subject to time. The sense of time passing is associated with sustained attention, and even if for that reason alone, it is only to be expected that this arises in the right hemisphere, subserved by the right prefrontal cortex and inferior parietal lobe."
Iain McGilchrist. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009.

"It is in this play of second chances that Rome feels most of its time, i.e. both 1995 and 2015. Vorenus' rise and fall (and rise and fall) feels like something from the era before TV was fully committed to continuity. People remember major historical events, but they don't consistently remember what they've done to each other."

"There's gonna be a party when the wolf comes home." Isaac Fellman. Isaac’s Law. June 27, 2022.

"Forget wealth versus poverty, belief versus doubt, power versus helplessness, public versus private. Never mind man versus woman, center versus margins, beautiful versus horrifying, master contra slave, even good against evil. Saying or not saying: that was where experience played out. Going away versus getting worse. What things came down to."
Richard Powers. Galatea 2.2. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995. p. 192.

"I visited York a couple of weeks ago. I had been staying at my parents’ house and decided to take the train. I’m sick of driving, sick of car culture, car anxiety, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover how swiftly the train would get me there: 43 minutes. To my mind, back when I used to live in York, in the mid-1990s, my birth county of Nottinghamshire was several whole planets away. This is what happens as the years progress: geographical distance somehow reduces, much like your concept of time. What is Three Months Ago, now? Three Months Ago is the last time I saw a particular close friend, the last time I had a proper meal out, the last time I listened to a favourite record. Three Months Ago is last Wednesday. But the three months I spent living in York, in late 1995, was forever."
Tom Cox, An In-Depth History Of The Railways, Tom Cox, February 26, 2026

'...which is another kind of grief...'

A few words on the end of grieving:

Yesterday I woke up happy and didn't think

about you until midnight.
This means my shrine is on fire.

Which is another kind of grief.
As if we said goodbye in my sleep.

— K. Iver, "April 25, 2020," in Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco

If you'd like to learn more about this book, I wrote about it for the Trans Rights Readathon.

When we read a novel, we can know everything except what the novelist chose not to tell us

"The uncritical repetition of half-truths by the press only reinforced my faith in the medium of fiction as the most honest investigative tool available to us," Askold Melnyczuk writes,

"because of all it does not claim for itself, as well as for the freedoms the genre grants. Fiction invites the writer to present an argument about causality. The only mysteries we're left with after finishing a novel are ones the writer has deliberately chosen not to resolve. Madame Bovary's suicide does not come as a shock; we know why Anna Karenina stepped in front of that train, no matter how much we hoped she would not."

— "Why My Favorite Characters to Write Are Often Unsympathetic and Unforgivable: Askold Melnyczuk on the Importance of Moral Complexity in Fiction," by Askold Melnyczuk, September 27, 2021.

Quotes: On friendship

Reflections on friendship. Quoted from books.

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and We can hear them too because We have Converged and Crashed and Collided and We are watching Eliza Bright in this moment — all of Us are — and We need to pause for a word on Friendship because the others wouldn’t know what this is if it Bit Them In The Literal Ass — most people say friends when they mean acquaintances and any people they don’t hate but when We say Friends We mean what is true — Family — the people We have and hold forever, even when We look at them and see only rage — where We can go from screaming at Each Other to screaming with Each Other in that binary way like a switch flipping — No to Yes and False to True — even after everything happens that’s about to happen and even after Eliza and Suzanne don’t live in the same state they will go on being Friends and that’s Our Meaning of Friends — Heartfriends — Chosen Family and We Embrace Eliza by proxy because Our Suzanne is Ours and they are Each Other’s for years and years to come and this is the sort of Kinship that We need to survive in this unfeeling world and it is Sad — Sad in the same way Preston is Sad — that the others don’t get to know it and they don’t understand it and they scramble for it in their mythmaking and their obsession and their constant pinging into the internet void as they pray in desperation that the others are listening — but they do not have the ‘and’ in them — not really
— A. E. Osworth, We Are Watching Eliza Bright (Grand Central Publishing, 2022)

It’s important to keep in mind, given what I’m about to relay, which is everything I remember from that evening, that I had truly never had a real friend before. Growing up I’d only had Joanie, who disliked me, and a girlfriend or two here and there in grade school, usually the other class reject. I remember a girl with braces on her legs in junior high, and an obese girl in high school who barely spoke. There was an Oriental girl whose parents owned the one Chinese restaurant in X-ville, but even she discarded me when she made the cheerleading squad. Those were not real friends. Believing that a friend is someone who loves you, and that love is the willingness to do anything, sacrifice anything for the other’s happiness, left me with an impossible ideal, until Rebecca. I held the phone close to my heart, caught my breath. I could have squealed with delight. If you’ve been in love you now this kind of exquisite anticipation, this ecstasy. I was on the brink of something, and I could feel it. I suppose I was in love with Rebecca. She awoke in my heart some long sleeping dragon. I’ve never felt that fire burning like that again. That day was without a doubt the most exciting day of my life.
— Ottessa Moshfegh. Eileen. New York: Penguin, 2015. p. 191.

It is through intimate non-threatening interaction with another human being that many of the most important lessons in managing our energy are learned. We need spiritual friends.
— David Brazier. The Feeling Buddha: A Buddhist Psychology of Character, Adversity, and Passion. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Chapter 16, “Psychotherapy,” p. 109.

When Amy ended our friendship, everything I had always known and soundly ignored cackled in my face like a hyena. As far as she knew, she was rejecting my—admittedly imperfect—companionate affection. But it seared marrow-deep as a repudiation of unconfessed love. It didn’t matter, I realized, that I had always shied away from pursuing a relationship with her—that I had, ultimately, wanted Paul more. I had loved her too, as a friend, and as someone I had desired: mourning her, I realized, would be a wretched ordeal.

And so it has been. So it is. Losing her has been one of the great heartaches of my adulthood: exponentially more painful than leaving my first husband and, in some ways, more humiliating.”

* * *

“I am empathetic, generally. I am loving, nearly always. But I was an inconsistent, sometimes greedy friend to Amy, and whether this unspooled from silent romantic affection ultimately doesn’t apply to the case. What I tried to be was a platonic friend, and when she judged me on that basis—when she considered how I measured up against what she wanted—Amy felt compelled to let me go.”

* * *

“Once in a while I lapse into self-castigation and call myself a chump for struggling so in the wake of a lost friendship that, by now, has calcified. Sometimes, mercifully, I forget about Amy. Often enough, I remember her with something like empathy and sad acceptance. But every now and then, I feel a fool. I ought not—I know this. We have all shit the friendship bed at some time or another.”

— Rachel Vorona Cote. Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2020.

...a definition of a breakup: the moment after which people no longer share an interpretation of their relationship; the point after which neither party has either the right or the ability to shape the stories that either tells about what passed between them. The advantage of this definition is that it requires mourning to take place in the absence of a hope that one day one's record will be cleared, one’s reputation restored. It had served the additional purpose of explaining why everyone who dated me before I got sober hated me: they simply had a different narrative.
— Grace Lavery. Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis. Seal Press, 2022. p. 135.

By late afternoon he was dead. Schiller was forty-five years old. * * * on 12 May Schiller was buried in the graveyard of Weimar's St Jakobskirche, a short fifteen-minute walk from Goethe’s house. Feigning illness, Goethe didn’t attend the funeral. He couldn't. 'I lose a friend and, with him, half of my own life,' he said, mourning 'my irreplaceable Schiller'. Everybody feared for Goethe. 'I'm afraid the old man will turn entirely to stone now,' Friedrich Schlegel wrote... On Goethe’s desk was a pile of papers covered in Schiller's handwriting – his unfinished Demetrius. They had discussed the play in so much detail that Goethe said, 'I could write the rest of his Demetrius myself.'
— Andrea Wulf. Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. Knopf, 2022.

“I tell them [young people] that the word ‘search’ has meant a daring existential journey, not a finger tap to already existing answers; that ‘friend’ is an embodied mystery that can be forged only face-to-face and heart-to-heart; and that ‘recognition’ is the glimmer of homecoming we experience in our beloved’s face, not ‘facial recognition.’”

— Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2020.