Fading Connections Quotes

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.

I don’t want friends to die...or fade away. I don’t want battles where we have to lose in order to win.

It was a lesson most people learned much earlier; that even friendship could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection, so consuming and powerful, could dissipate like fog.

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

I was remembering the things we had done together, the times we had had. It would have been pleasant to preserve that comradeship in the days that came after. Pleasant, but alas, impossible. That which had brought us together had gone, and now our paths diverged, according to our natures and needs. We would meet again, from time to time, but always a little more as strangers; until perhaps at last, as old men with only memories left, we could sit together and try to share them.

We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

And the days darken round me, and the years, Among new men, strange faces, other minds.

In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.

Between the age of 30 and going fishing, none of my friendships had any of that magic dust of when you were young. There was a sort of functionality to them, just keeping in touch. 'Oh, I should invite so and so, I haven't seen them for ages.

I was going to say 'my friend Stuart', but I suppose he's not a friend any more. I seem to have lost a number of friends in the last few years. I don't mean that I've fallen out with them, in any dramatic way. We've just decided not to stay in touch. And that's what it's been: a decision, a conscious decision, because it's not difficult to stay in touch with people nowadays, there are so many different ways of doing it. But as you get older, I think that some friendships start to feel increasingly redundant. You just find yourself asking, "What's the point?" And then you stop.