Sure, romantic love is nice, but the platonic love between friends? It’s a thing of beauty. And luckily, some of the worlds smartest, funniest, sharpest people have put that feeling into words in these friendship quotes.
Whether you’re looking for a strong Instagram caption to celebrate the love you feel for your bestie, or, you’re after a cute quote to copy into her next birthday card, these friendship quotes manage to capture the full spectrum of platonic love — whether it’s the undying affection, the unflinching support or even the complex little jealousies.
So, without further ado, here are the best friendship quotes to share with your bestie. (Bonus: the entire song “For Good” from Wicked — please prepare yourself to weep during Part Two if you don’t know it yet!)
“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.”
“Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses — pretty but designed to SLOW women down.”
― Roxane Gay
“There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul.”
― Edith Wharton
“Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses … swapped back and forth and over again.”
— Michelle Obama, Becoming
“I’m so thankful for friendship. It beautifies life so much.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
“We are friends for life. When we’re together the years fall away. Isn’t that what matters? To have someone who can remember with you? To have someone who remembers how far you’ve come?”
“Remember, ‘No one’s more important than people’! In other words, friendship is the most important thing―not career or housework, or one’s fatigue―and it needs to be tended and nurtured.”
― Julia Child, My Life in France
“I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can’t believe I’m here without her.”
“I always feel that the great high privilege, relief, and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.”
— Katherine Mansfield
“In college and right after college, there’s this sense that your friends are your family. It’s really painful in your late twenties when you realise that they’re not your family, and they’re going to make their own families.”
“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
— Jane Austen
“True friendship resists time, distance, and silence.”
— Isabel Allende
“I can’t believe I’ve known you for 20 years and you’re still my favourite person to talk to.”
— New Girl
“And soon enough you’re best friends. Laughing at the other girls who think they’re so cool.”
— Taylor Swift, “Fifteen”
“Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.”
“It is the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.”
— Marlene Dietrich
“Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.”
– George Eliot
“Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.”
— Octavia Butler
“Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer.”
— Jean de la Fontaine
