A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.
Interpretation
As we age, we come to understand the irreplaceable value of old friendships.
This quote reflects on how, as we grow older, we come to appreciate the significance of long-standing friendships that cannot be recreated. It emphasizes that deep, meaningful connections take time to develop, and the bonds we form in our youth become treasures that cannot easily be replaced.
In practice
During a speech at a reunion, one might quote this to emphasize the lasting bonds formed in youth.
In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.
[E]xceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.
The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.
Let me tell you something: for hundreds of thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or those like us would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiley-face, ingratiating way — because it’s had to give so much more ground and because we know so much more. But you’ve got no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side.
What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.
Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.
Hear no ill of a friend, nor speak any of an enemy.
We are wont to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands...Thus it is hard for us to understand the political relevance of friendship...But for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse...The converse (in contrast to the intimate talk in which individuals speak about themselves), permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friend’s presence, is concerned with the common world.
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.
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