“For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces.”

“The friends you make in college are friends you’ll have for life, even if you don’t talk for years at a time.”

“It’s much easier to not know things sometimes. Things change and friends leave. And life doesn’t stop for anybody.”

“Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.”

“the world is not a pleasant place to be without someone to hold and be held by.”

“That’s what I love about Aibileen, she can take the most complicated things in life and wrap them up so small and simple, they’ll fit right in your pocket.”

“I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do — to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like.”

“Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.”

“إن السعادة هي أن أشرب كوب شاي.. مع صديق.. في لحظة رضا.”

“…Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel’s hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.”

“What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.”

“We know from daily life that we exist for other people first of all, for whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.”

“…Who could refrain, That had a heart to love, and in that heart Courage to make love known?”