Is it just us, or are there a lot of stomach-turning quotes about female friendship knocking around the internet these days? There’s the anatomically incorrect: “Friendship is one mind in two bodies.” The tired old clichés: “A good friend is like a four-leaf clover; hard to find and lucky to have.” And perhaps worst of all, the rhyming offerings: “Best friends are hard to find / Because the very best is already mine.”
Enough already. Every great female friendship we’ve collected has been built on a solid foundation of evenings spent laughing so hard you can’t breathe, deep emotional vulnerability (the proper ugly kind), and the shared discovery of rogue chin hairs. So some ditty about four-leaf clovers really isn’t going to cover it. We’ve scoured the web to find some quotes that won’t make you want to throw up / roll your eyes / give up on the internet altogether. These will make you laugh, make you sob, and make really good birthday card fodder for your bestie. Because we’re all about equality and don’t (strictly speaking) believe you need to possess a vagina in order to pass thought-provoking commentary on female friendship, we’ve included a few quotes from male writers, too. Y’know, to be fair.
You’re welcome.
1. “A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked”.
― Bernard Meltzer, radio personality
2. “Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than the government. It is almost the equal of family.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
3. “‘You’re too hard on yourself,’ she said. ‘You can do long-term love. You’ve done it better than anyone I know.’
‘How? My longest relationship was two years and that was over when I was twenty-four.’
‘I’m talking about you and me.’ she said.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know about Love
4. “She is a friend of my mind. She gathers me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and gives them back to me in all the right order.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved
5. “True friendship is never serene.”
― Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sevigne
6. “We could fight and wrangle and name-call, but it didn’t change anything underneath. She was still my oldest friend.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
8. “Being honest may not get you a lot of friends but it’ll always get you the right ones.”
― John Lennon, musician
9. “As a culture, we tend to think of female friendship as predominantly a phenomenon of the young: out clubbing together, mending heartbreak together, racketing around on mini-breaks, and being a gang. We presume that, as we get older, our marriages become more important than our friendships. In reality, this isn’t so. Any group of middle-aged women will have, collectively, gone through divorce, death of parents, the raising of children, unemployment, mental ill-health, abortion, miscarriage, promotions, demotions, joy and sorrow. If you really want to see a closely-bonded, ride-or-die group of women laughing like hyenas, walk past a middle-aged womens’ night out. If I had time, I’d reboot Sex & The City as ‘Sixty & The City.’ That’s where the real female camaraderie lives.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
10. “One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.”
― Euripides
11. “Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
12. “They were not perfect, but they were my friends.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
13. “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
14. “A snowball in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
