Book Quotes About Friendship

By Lucy Levine · Updated November 3, 2026

The best book quotes about friendship are rarely speeches. They are oaths sworn over an imaginary stream, a motto bullied out of a reluctant Porthos, a boy deciding he will go to hell rather than betray his friend. Below are thirteen lines on friends from Montgomery, Austen, Dumas, Twain, Dickens, Melville, Mary Shelley, Kenneth Grahame, Montaigne and Emerson, each copied from a public-domain text, with who says it and where.

Friendship has fewer famous lines than love, and they tend to be better, because novelists write friendship as something done rather than declared. You can watch that happen in almost every passage here.

Book quotes about friendship: wanting a friend

1. A bosom friend

A bosom friend—an intimate friend, you know—a really kindred spirit to whom I can confide my inmost soul. I’ve dreamed of meeting her all my life.
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L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, chapter VIII

Anne is supposed to be learning the Lord’s Prayer at Marilla’s table when she breaks off to ask whether she will ever have a bosom friend in Avonlea. Marilla’s reply is A–a what kind of friend? The comedy is in the gap between Anne’s vocabulary and Marilla’s, and the sadness is that an orphan who has never had a friend has the definition ready.

2. I have no friend

I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Letter 2

Before there is a monster or a scientist, there is Robert Walton, an explorer writing from Archangel to his sister, Mrs. Saville. He is twenty-eight, self-educated, and lonely, and he says so with unusual plainness. The novel answers his wish in the worst way: the friend he finds in the Arctic is Victor Frankenstein. The book’s loneliest lines, from the creature, are in book quotes about solitude.

3. Kindred spirits are not so scarce

Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.

L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, chapter XIX

Anne says this of Miss Barry, Diana’s prickly Aunt Josephine, after the two girls raced onto the spare-room bed in the dark and landed on her. Miss Barry has just invited Anne to visit her in town. The lesson is a grown-up one: a kindred spirit is not always obvious at first, and is sometimes an old woman you have sat on.

Oaths and mottoes

4. As long as the sun and moon shall endure

I solemnly swear to be faithful to my bosom friend, Diana Barry, as long as the sun and moon shall endure. Now you say it and put my name in.

L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, chapter XII

Diana is shocked when Anne asks her to swear, because swearing is wicked. Anne explains there are two kinds. The oath should be made over running water, so they imagine the path is a stream. Diana repeats it with a laugh fore and aft, which is exactly the right response to Anne, and the friendship holds anyway.

5. All for one

“And now, gentlemen,” said D’Artagnan, without stopping to explain his conduct to Porthos, “All for one, one for all—that is our motto, is it not?”

Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers, chapter IX

The most famous friendship motto in fiction arrives in the middle of an argument. D’Artagnan has just let the police arrest a man in front of the four of them, and Porthos is ashamed. Athos and Aramis order him to hold out his hand and swear, and he does, grumbling. A motto is how friends settle a quarrel without having to explain themselves.

Friendship tested

6. I’ll go to hell

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter XXXI

Huck has written to Miss Watson to tell her where Jim, her runaway slave, is being held. He feels washed clean, then remembers the raft, and Jim taking his watch so he could sleep, and Jim saying Huck was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now. Huck believes he is choosing damnation. The reader sees a boy choosing a friend over everything he has been taught, and Twain lets him think he is wrong.

7. Ever the best of friends

“Ever the best of friends; an’t us, Pip? Don’t cry, old chap!”

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, chapter VII

Joe Gargery has been telling young Pip how, when he courted Pip’s sister, he told her there was room for the child at the forge. Pip breaks down and hugs him round the neck. Joe repeats the phrase when Jaggers arrives with Pip’s great expectations, and Dickens saves it for the end. In chapter LVII Joe quietly pays Pip’s debts, and his letter finishes P.S. Ever the best of friends. More of Dickens’s lines are in Charles Dickens quotes.

8. What’s a little wet?

“Ratty, my generous friend! I am very sorry indeed for my foolish and ungrateful conduct. My heart quite fails me when I think how I might have lost that beautiful luncheon-basket.

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, chapter I, “The River Bank”

The Mole has grabbed the sculls on his first day in a boat, missed the water entirely and tipped them both into the river. The Rat fishes him out, laughing. The Rat’s answer is the whole ethic of the book: That’s all right, bless you!” responded the Rat cheerily. “What’s a little wet to a Water Rat? He then invites the Mole to come and stay.

9. Bosom friends on a whaler

Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 10, “A Bosom Friend”

Earlier in the chapter, after a shared pipe, Queequeg presses his forehead to Ishmael’s and declares that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends. Ishmael notes that a countryman’s sudden friendship would have been suspicious, and that the old rules do not apply here. Melville’s tenderness is unembarrassed. The book’s stranger side is in the strangest lines in Moby-Dick.

10. Austen’s balm

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, chapter 4

Catherine Morland has not seen Mr. Tilney in the Pump Room, and that same morning she is taking Isabella Thorpe’s arm. The narrator’s maxim sounds sincere and is not quite: Isabella’s friendship turns out to be the false one in the novel. Austen’s advertisement says the book was finished in 1803. More of her irony is collected in Jane Austen quotes.

Two essayists on friendship

11. Because it was he

If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.

Michel de Montaigne, “Of Friendship”, Essays, Book I, chapter XXVII, trans. Charles Cotton

The friend is Etienne de la Boetie, whom Montaigne met, as the edition’s introduction puts it, by pure chance at some festive celebration. Montaigne first dismisses ordinary friendships as mere acquaintance, then gives up trying to explain the real one. The repetition is the argument: no reason survives except the two people.

12. With whom I may be sincere

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship”, Essays: First Series

Emerson names two elements of friendship, truth and tenderness, and this is truth. A page later he calls a friend a sort of paradox in nature, his own being repeated in a foreign form, and he ends the paragraph by calling a friend the masterpiece of nature. Thinking aloud is the test, and most of the friends in this list pass it.

Quick reference: friendship quotes by book

Quote fragment	Book	Chapter
“a really kindred spirit”	Anne of Green Gables	VIII
“I have no friend, Margaret”	Frankenstein	Letter 2
“Kindred spirits are not so scarce”	Anne of Green Gables	XIX
“as long as the sun and moon shall endure”	Anne of Green Gables	XII
“All for one, one for all”	The Three Musketeers	IX
“I’ll go to hell”	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	XXXI
“Ever the best of friends”	Great Expectations	VII, LVII
“Ratty, my generous friend!”	The Wind in the Willows	I
“a cosy, loving pair”	Moby-Dick	10
“the finest balm”	Northanger Abbey	4
“because it was he, because it was I”	Montaigne, Essays	I, XXVII
“with whom I may be sincere”	Emerson, Essays: First Series	“Friendship”

A detail worth knowing before you reread Montgomery: the word Anne leans on hardest, “kindred spirit”, first appears in chapter IV, about Matthew, whom she has known for less than a day.