Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

In dialogue scenes, my favorite moments are when people aren't talking because you can cut to the heart of the matter much more quickly, often with a look. People hide things in words. When you don't have words to hide things in, it becomes much more direct and much more immediate of a connection.

Relations are errors that Nature makes. / Your spouse you can put on the shelf. / But your friends, dear friends, are the quaint mistakes / You always commit yourself.

I think friends are an extension of you and I always say, check out a persons five immediate friends and you'll know everything about them.

People don't always express their inner thoughts to one another; a conversation may be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person really thinks or feels.

In few men is it part of nature to respect a friend's prosperity without begrudging him.

Everybody's friend is nobody's.

I understand why people want to look up their friends - usually they want to see what people they've wanted to have sex with look like.

Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then

And he was my friend. Not that he wouldn't kill me if things turned out that way, but he wouldn't like doing it. With humans, what more could you ask for a friend?

Sometimes we lose friends for whose loss our regret is greater than our grief, and others for whom our grief is greater than our regret.

I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.

Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

How few friends would remain friends if each could see the sentiments of the other in their entirety.

Women are quite able to make friends with a man; but to preserve such a friendship - that no doubt requires the assistance of a slight physical antipathy

People say when you're in love, you don't need etiquette. Well, you need it then more than anything. Or they say, "At home I can just be myself." What they mean is they can be their worst selves... They always mean they will save all their anxiety about how to behave for somebody like the head waiter of a restaurant, someone they'll never see again.

You can't tell your best buddy that you love him.

And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends.

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.

I have a lot of women friends - I feel like I finally matured a little. But initially I was attracted to some of them. I liked everything they were about. I think men are just taught: "Okay, well then, I should try to have sex with them." I'm just lucky that it went in the friendship direction, and it became a much stronger bond that's lasted a long time. You wonder how many potentially great friends you lose along the way because you become lovers and it is so painful when it's over and you can't turn it into a positive friendship.

We are keenly aware of the faults of our friends, but if they like us enough it doesn't matter.

If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them; if we are constantly with them, we despise them.

You'll find that my coquetry is quite impartial, which allows me to keep my friends.

Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.

I naturally prefer the company of people who hold grudges, as long as they are not held against me.