“Friendship should be more than biting Time should sever.”
“…real friendship once ended, cannot be mended.”
TS Eliot, Murder In The Cathedral
“It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age. My friends fall around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered.”
Byron
“Cancel, Catullus, the expectancies of friendship
cancel the kindness deemed to accrue there:
kindness is barren, friendship breeds nothing,
only the weight of past deeds growing oppressive
as Catullus has discovered, bitter & troubled,
in one he had once accounted a unique friend.”
Catullus, No. LXIII.
“…I have no friend in the world.
Let them come and kill me
If they hate me so, to kill me would be kindness;
Life is all pain to me; I want to die.
…The afflicted found a friend;
He that was mine,
Is lost, and I have no other.”
Sophocles, Electra
“Few are my years, and yet I feel
The world was ne’er design’d for me:
Ah! Why do dark’ning shades conceal
The hour when man must cease to be?
Once I beheld a splendid dream,
A visionary scene of bliss:
Truth!—wherefore did thy hated beam
Awake me to a world like this?
I loved—but those I loved are gone;
Had friends—my early friends are fled:
How cheerless feels the heart alone
When all its former hopes are dead!…
Byron, From ‘I would I Were a Careless Child.’
“…friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.”
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
“I am—yet what I am, none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:—
I am the self-consumer of my woes;—
They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes:—
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,—
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best
Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.”
John Clare, from ‘I am’
“…no one is free
from faults; the best is the man who is hampered by the smallest.
A kindly friend will weigh, as is fair, my virtues against my failings,
and if he wants my affections he will come down on the side
of my virtues as being more numerous(if in fact they are more numerous!).
On that principle he will be weighed in the same scales.
If you expect your friend to put up with your boils
you’ll forget about his warts. It’s fair that anyone who asks
indulgence for his faults should grant the same in return.”
Horace, Satires, III, 67-75.
“Left in the world alone
Where nothing seems my own
And everything is weariness to me
‘Tis life without an end
‘Tis a world without a friend
And everything is sorrowful I see”
John Clare.
“‘I agree with you,’ replied the stranger, ‘in believing that friendship is not only a desirable, but a possible acquisition. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship. You have hope, and the world before you, and have no cause for despair. But I—I have lost everything, and, and cannot begin life anew.”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
"So I too
was abandoned by some of my friends – not out of hatred,
but because they were scared stiff.
They had no lack of loyalty, or the will to duty:
they just dreaded hostile gods.
You can say they’re timid, say they’re over-cautious,
but they don’t deserve to be called bad –
or is it that my good-heartedness excuses much-cherished
friends, sees their good side, absolves them from blame?
Let this indulgence suffice them – the right to remain silent
about how my witness, too, excused their act.
But you few are a nobler group, who held it shameful
to offer me no aid in my distress,
and my gratitude for you kindness will only perish
when my body’s reduced to ash –"
Ovid, Black Sea Letters.

"Oh what a misery it is to have an intellect in splints".