Last Stop on the Friendship Blog Hop

It's the last stop on Scrapbooking from the Inside Out's FRIENDSHIP Blog Hop!

My friends mean the world to me. They are indeed my chosen family. I feel so blessed, especially in these last months when life has been somewhat unkind, to have a wonderful group of friends who life me up, support me and give me strength.

One of the best has been Janet – she has been a close friend of mine since we worked together back in NY in 1996. We found that we were kindred spirits. We shared our difficulties, fears and triumphs. We laughed our butts off, we cried over losses, we shopped for shoes at Nordstrom, drank Frappuccinos in Rye, and ordered the side dish sampler at Boston Chicken. When I left NY, there was no worry that we would grow apart. In fact, we’ve never been closer. Through divorces, deaths, separations, career changes, somehow we managed to stay in each other’s lives in a meaningful way even though we BOTH hate to fly! We talk a LOT. She was just here in April and I already miss her. She is the kind of friend I can call at 2 AM for support (did it just last week) and she willingly helps me get through. I would do the same for her, and feel honored to have that opportunity, and to have her as one of my chosen sisters.




In honor of Janet and all our special friends, we're giving away a FRIENDSHIP kit! The winner will be drawn from ALL blogs, so the more comments you leave on blogs in the hop, the more chances you have of winning. Make sure you start at Melissa’s Blog and follow along to get some behind the scenes dish on what inspired each designers' layout. The giveaway ends at 5:00 PM PST on Tuesday and the winner will be announced shortly thereafter here on the SFTIO blog and on Facebook. Or jump on in and buy your single kit or subscription now before they’re all gone!

In case you haven't been to our monthly Inspiration Page, I want to share another industry-exclusive feature of our site: our quotations list. We offer these each month on the kit theme to help jump start your journaling by sharing words from great thinkers (other than yourselves!), dig deep, think about your process and understand yourself through our amazing craft. There's even more on that page - stock photos, prompts, and a music playlist. All for you, always available.

Wanna be friends? Come join us!

Love,
Rachel

Gratitude preserves old friendships, and procures new. Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing. Elie Wiesel

There is an important difference between love and friendship. While the former delights in extremes and opposites, the latter demands equality. The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this? Henry David Thoreau

Friendship that flows from the heart cannot be frozen by adversity, as the water that flows from the spring cannot congeal in winter. Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity. Kahlil Gibran

Friendships are fragile things, and require as much handling as any other fragile and precious thing. The best relationships--friendship and otherwise--tend to be those where you *can* say anything to the other person but you don't say *everything*. Audrey Beth Stein

True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island…to find one real friend in a lifetime is good fortune; to keep him is a blessing. Baltasar Gracian

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable. Bruce Lee

Friendship with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anybody else in the world. Eleanor Roosevelt

Friendships are what our dreams are made of. We hold onto each other with its binding love. We stand close to each other, hand in hand, showing each other we understand. Some friends may come and go, but you are the truest friend I know. Of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life far the greatest is the possession of Friendship. Epicurus

It takes a lot of understanding, time, and trust to gain a close friendship with someone. As I approach a time of my life of complete uncertainty, my friends are my most precious asset. Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. F. Scott Fitzgerald

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it's the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him with his friend. Ralph Waldo Emerson

People who have a lot of money and no time we call 'rich'. People who have time but no money we call 'poor'. Yet the most precious gifts--love, friendship, time with loved ones--grow only in the sweet soil of "unproductive" time. The essence of true friendship is to make allowances for another's little lapses. David Storey

Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy. Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation. George Washington

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship. Henry Ward Beecher

Friendship is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. Aristotle

When friendships are real, they are not glass threads, or frostwork, but the solidest things we know. A friend is the first person who come in when the whole world has gone out. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival. C.S. Lewis

A friend is one of the nicest things you can have, and one of the best things you can be. Douglas Pagels

Friendship isn't a big thing - it's a million little things. A single rose can be my garden... a single friend, my world. Leo Buscaglia

Only your real friends will tell you when your face is dirty. Sicilian Proverb

The antidote for fifty enemies is one friend. Aristotle

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. Albert Schweitzer

A loyal friend laughs at your jokes when they're not so good, and sympathizes with your problems when they're not so bad. Arnold H. Glasgow

The friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you. Elbert Hubbard

If a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it. Edgar Watson Howe

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend. Henry David Thoreau

A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down. Arnold Glasow

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restored and sorrows end. William Shakespeare

The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart. Elisabeth Foley

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend. William Blake

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human. George Santayana

A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails. Donna Roberts

If I had to sum up Friendship in one word, it would be Comfort. Terri Guillemets

If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone. A man should keep his friendships in constant repair. Samuel Johnson

True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable. Dave Tyson Gentry

You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job. Laurence J. Peter

Friends are those rare people who ask how you are and then wait for the answer. Unknown

A friend is the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out. Grace Pulpit

One doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one. D.H. Lawrence

Constant use will not wear ragged the fabric of friendship. Dorothy Parker

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. Virginia Woolf

The language of friendship is not words but meanings. Henry David Thoreau

It's important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to the friendship that we are not. Mignon McLaughlin

It is the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter. Marlene Dietrich

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind. Toni Morrison

Cherish the friend who tells you a harsh truth, wanting ten times more to tell you a loving lie. Robert Brault

Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love. Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend. Plautus

If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give. George MacDonald




Our most difficult task as a friend is to offer understanding when we don't understand. Robert Brault

Yes we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check her diary when we arrange to meet. Jeanette Winterson

It takes a long time to grow an old friend. John Leonard

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere. Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help. Epicurus

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. Henri Nouwen

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship. William Blake

The tender friendships one gives up, on parting, leave their bite on the heart, but also a curious feeling of a treasure somewhere buried. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Friendship is a sheltering tree. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends. Shirley Maclaine

What do we ask of friendship except to be taken for what we pretend to be - and without having to pretend. Robert Brault

But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away. Dinah Craik

A true friend unbosoms freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably. William Penn

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine. Thomas Jefferson

A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world. Lois Wyse

The best time to make friends is before you need them. Ethel Barrymore

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing. Katherine Mansfield

A friend can tell you things you don't want to tell yourself. Frances Ward Weller

There is magic in long-distance friendships. They let you relate to other human beings in a way that goes beyond being physically together and is often more profound. Diana Cortes

A friend accepts us as we are yet helps us to be what we should. Unknown

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away. Barbara Kingsolver

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

'Tis a great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults; greater to tell him his. Benjamin Franklin The best rule of friendship is to keep your heart a little softer than your head. Unknown

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive. Anäis Nin

Friends are relatives you make for yourself. Eustache Deschamps

Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference. Emil Ludwig

Ah, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Hold a true friend with both your hands. Nigerian Proverb

Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of. Sarah Orne Jewett

The best way to mend a broken heart is time and girlfriends. Gwyneth Paltrow

Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness. Dag Hammarskjold

I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better. Plutarch

The essence of true friendship is to make allowance for another's little lapses. David Storey

In my friend, I find a second self. Isabel Norton

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person's eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him, understood him. At these moments something fine and spiritual passes between two friends. These are the moments worth living. Don Marquis

The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship. Francis Bacon

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Karl Menninger

Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality. Rowan D. Williams

We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection. Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night. Margaret Mead

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other? George Eliot

There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever. Rollo May

Friendship is a sheltering tree. Samuel Coleridge

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. Marcel Proust

[W]e all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us. Margaret Guenther

Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love. Jane Austen

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine. Thomas Jefferson

Love is like the wild-rose briar; Friendship is like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose briar blooms, But which will bloom most constantly? Emily Bronte