“... friends are such a mixed blessing.”
“Blessed is he who can call his family friends and his friends family.”
“The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.”
“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
“A blessed companion is a book! A book that, fitly chosen, is a life-long friend.”
“[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”