One of the strange things about friendship is that time together isn't cancelled out by time apart. One doesn't erase the other or balance it on some invisible scale. You can spend a few hours with someone and they will change your life, or you can spend a lifetime with a person and remain unchanged.
Interpretation
True friendship transcends time and distance, influencing lives profoundly.
This quote emphasizes the idea that the quality of friendship is not solely determined by the amount of time spent together. Rather, significant moments can have a profound impact on our lives, regardless of how much time we have known someone, while long-term relationships may not always lead to personal growth or change.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of relationships, you could quote this to highlight how deep connections can form in brief encounters.
People who lose children have their hearts warped into weird shapes. Some try to deny it has happened. Some pretend it hasn't. Losing friends or parents is not the same. To lose a child is beyond comprehension. It defies biology. It contradicts the natural order of history and genealogy. It derails common sense. It violates time. It creates a huge, black, bottomless hole that swallows all hope.
The better part of one's life consists of his friendships.
I have had, and may have still, a thousand friends, as they are called, in life, who are like one's partners in the waltz of this world -not much remembered when the ball is over.
You shone like a star. The funniest, wisest writer & the finest friend
We often talk too much & listen too little. The surer route to winning a friend isn't to convince them that you're right, but that you care what they think.
Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship.
A friend in power is a friend lost.
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