Sixth grade was a big time, in my childhood, of hoops and friendship, and coming up with funny things.

I spent my childhood in the country and started reading even before going to school. There was nothing else in my life but sketching and reading.

Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.

Acquaintances we meet, enjoy, and can easily leave behind; but friendship grows deep roots.

When befriended, remember it; when you befriend, forget it.

My lawyer has been a good friend of mine for a long time. He and I continuously have conversations.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his friendship in a constant repair.

My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

We do not so much need the help of our friends as the confidence of their help in need.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

This was life in the ’30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

My mom and I have always been really close. She’s always been the friend that was always there. There were times when, in middle school and junior high, I didn’t have a lot of friends. But my mom was always my friend. Always.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.

To this day, some of my closest friends say, ‚Gaga, you know, everything’s great. You’re a singer; your dreams have come true.‘ But, still, when certain things are said to you over and over again as you’re growing up, it stays with you and you wonder if they’re true.

It is not so much our friends‘ help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.

I’m from the generation that had the boys‘ door and the girls‘ door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

When we see the face of a child, we think of the future. We think of their dreams about what they might become, and what they might accomplish.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

I grew up reading science fiction.

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.

It pays to know the enemy – not least because at some time you may have the opportunity to turn him into a friend.

At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first ‚feeling‘ for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.

A friend doesn’t go on a diet because you are fat.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

My mom is American, so I was raised in her household in my formative years.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.

For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you’d would wake up times and hope that the next day you’d be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home.

My friends and I had fun together, but I was more reserved, not at all the life of the party. I would just be the quiet one in the room.

I gave my archive to Emory University because there’s a really dear friend who teaches there, Rudolph Byrd, and he’s the editor.

Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?

I have a feeling that I make a very good friend, and I’m a good mother, and a good sister, and a good citizen. I am involved in life itself – all of it. And I have a lot of energy and a lot of nerve.

All the learnin‘ my father paid for was a bit o‘ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

I like to look good, my friend.

A friend is, as it were, a second self.

Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

I don’t have many friends; I’m very much a loner. As a child I was very isolated, and I’ve never been really close to anyone.

When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.

When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said – and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded – ‚It’s like hair color. It’s nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It’s not a subject.‘ This was a very healthy attitude.

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

I grew up as this very carefree, happy kid then things turned darker for me. Maybe it was because I saw that the world wasn’t as happy a place as I had hoped it would be for me.

When I talk to kids, I’m really listening. When I do that, we have a little bit of a bigger connection than me being Kendrick Lamar and you being a student. It’s almost like we’re friends. Because a friend listens.

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

Friendship… is not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.

Remember that the most valuable antiques are dear old friends.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‚Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.‘

In football, I don’t have a lot of friends. The people who I really trust, there are not many… Most of the time, I’m alone.

I’m a girls‘ girl. I have guy friends, but the problem with having guy friends is, like, I always get linked to them, and they’ll end up in a slideshow of people I’ve apparently dated on the Internet.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

I love making new friends and I respect people for a lot of different reasons.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

I didn’t have a father figure in the house.