The Soviet state was, in fact, almost perfectly designed to make people unhappy. It denied its citizens not just hope, but also trust. Every activity had to be sanctioned by the state. Any person could be an informant. No action could be guaranteed to be without consequence. Father Dmitry preached friendship and warmth and belief to his parishioners, and inspired a generation to live as humans and not as parts of a machine.

I had a friend where it turned out that she hated my guts, all through our friendship. I thought she was my best friend, and then, in high school, she turned on me and had sordid affairs with all of the people that I'd dated. It was less hurtful because I was in high school, so it was more like, 'What's wrong with you? Gross!'

I had more friends on my hockey team than I did on my soccer team. I might have been better at soccer, to be honest. But I think it was more the friendship, and my family was more of a hockey family than a soccer family, so when I had to make a decision, I tried hockey, and it turned out to be a good decision.

I think faith helps me a lot. God wants you to be where He wants you to be, and that's where I want to be. If I do not get a part, I understand that maybe I needed to be home at that time, maybe in school; there's always a reason. My faith is also where my core friends are, at my church, a faith-based friendship.

“Well, it seems to me that the best relationships - the ones that last - are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship. You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been flicked somewhere. And the person who was just a friend is... suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.”

Most men and women born in the fifties or earlier were socialized to believe that marriages and/or committed romantic bonds of any kind should take precedence over all other relationships. Had I been evaluating my relationships from a standpoint that emphasized growth rather than duty and obligation, I would have understood that abuse irreparably undermines bonds. All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.... Women who would no more tolerate a friendship in which they were emotionally and physically abused stay in romantic relationships where these violations occur regularly. Had they brought to these bonds the same standards they bring to friendship they would not accept victimization.

In friendship...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another...the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting--any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian friends, "Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another." The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.

If my friend asks me to sit in a temple belonging to a God that I do not know, because he needs a friend to sit with him, I will be happy to sit there in the foreign temple. Because the temple itself is an outer container only. What is the true religion? What is the inner oil contained by that outer container? The inner oil is the friendship I share with my friend. The true religion is being there to sit beside my friend. If I cannot do this for my friend, then how am I worthy to sit in any temple, whether belonging to a God that I know or to a God that I don't know? If there is no inner oil within my soul, I do not deserve to sit in any temple. Religion is the friendship within the heart, not the place where we sit on a holy day. Religion is the oil within the lamp, not the metal container we see as the lamp.

We would never go shopping together or eat an entire cake while we complained about men. He'd never invite me over to his house for dinner or a barbecue. We'd never be lovers. But there was a very good chance that one of us would be the last person the other saw before we died. It wasn't friendship the way most people understood it, but it was friendship. There were several people I'd trust with my life, but there is no one else I'd trust with my death. Jean-Claude and even Richard would try to hold me alive out of love or something that passed for it. Even my family and other friends would fight to keep me alive. If I wanted death, Edward would give it to me. Because we both understand that it isn't death that we fear. It's living.

I have no right to make you love me, or to love you. But I do know that love is something that is tested and mended over time."I don't know if purely romantic love can last through anything (it is so based on feelings and attraction, both of which are fickle at times), but I think friendship can, and when the romantic love and friendship get blurred together into one it makes 'relationship cement,' I think." - Stay by Jennifer Silverwood"And then, real love I think comes later. When you really get to know someone and how they think and feel, when you can't imagine if something were to happen to them. When you trust them and want to spend all your time doing nothing with them, when you want to grow old together." - Stay by Jennifer Silverwood