While some friendships can be enriching, edifying, filled with adventure, others are insanely complicated. Many are all of the above. Any combination of snubs, slights, misunderstandings, or betrayals can disrupt the status quo — and a rock-solid bond can seesaw into feelings of exclusion and abandonment. There are also the run-of-the-mill lifestyle shifts — job promotions, cross-country moves, babies, new relationships — that inevitably keep us ebbing and flowing away from and back toward each other over and over again. The Cut brings you a roundup of friendship quotes from wildly successful women — from Oprah to Gloria Steinem, Amy Poehler to Greta Gerwig — on the realities and complexities of a true best friend.
Jane Fonda
“I think that is one reason why women live longer than men. Friendship between women is different than friendship between men. We talk about different things. We delve deep. We go under, even if we haven’t seen each other for years. There are hormones that are released from women to other women that are healthy and do away with the stress hormones … It’s my women friends that keep starch in my spine and without them, I don’t know where I would be. We have to just hang together and help each other.” —Vanity Fair, January 2015
Lena Dunham
“I love the friendships that you see in Nancy Meyers’ movies, but for me, that kind of friendship is elusive. I feel like a lot of the female relationships I see on TV or in movies are in some way free of the kind of jealousy and anxiety and posturing that has been such a huge part of my female friendships, which I hope lessens a little bit with age … I think about my best friendship — which the Marnie-Hannah friendship in Girls is based on — as like a great romance of my young life.” —Interview
Zadie Smith
“A lot of women, when they’re young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It’s easy to be friends when everyone’s 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women’s friendships begin to founder. I was interested in why that was, why it’s not possible for a woman to see her friend living differently and just think, Oh, she lives differently.” —PBS NewsHour, October 2012
Claire Danes
“I do think that women need each other in a way that men might not need each other. I don’t want to make any gross claims, but we do have a kind of intimacy. There is almost a kind of romance in female friendship, and I don’t know if it’s the same for men … We have that one friend, and we practice with each other in preadolescence, and then we kind of move on to having a more mature version of that with a man. And then those relationships have to implode before you can kind of meet each other again and renegotiate your friendship as adults.” —Interview
Jemima Kirke
“A woman will always be my best friend. I’ll never have a best friend who is a man. It just doesn’t work that way. So many times young girls will be like, ‘I’m a guy’s girl.’ And I’m like, ‘No, you’re not. There’s no way a man can understand you like a woman, and you’re a guy’s girl because you’re threatened by other women.’ I was like that. I was only men. But that’s because I felt special around men, and with a woman I can really be put in my place, and I’m on the same level as them. That’s the way it’s changed, is that I love women now, and I didn’t before. Because I was scared of them, because they understood me.” —GQ, April 2012
Nora Ephron
“The thing with friends when you get older — I mean this is not anything I haven’t written about — is they can’t be replaced. When you’re 30, you accumulate friends and you shed friends and you get closer at certain moments to some than others. And you have a huge bench of friends. And then that’s just not true.” — Salon, November 2010
Tavi Gevinson
“Girl hate is not hating someone who happens to be a girl, it’s hating someone because we’re told that, as girls, we should hate other girls who are as awesome as or more awesome than ourselves. That there can ever only be ONE cool girl, ONE funny girl, ONE smart girl, etc., in a circle of people … I’m close friends with a girl I used to have some serious girl hate for. Recognizing what a wonderful person she is not only made me realize how idiotic I was being before, but it really did make me feel better about myself. Sometimes we can convince ourselves that pointing out flaws in others makes us feel good, but ultimately, those moments of pleasure are fleeting. In the long run, they get you in the habit of looking for flaws in everyone, including yourself.” —Rookie, September 2011
Lisa See
“I have a friend that I’ve known since high school, and when you have a real close friendship like that … this is someone who has, in a sense, known you your whole life … When you have those kinds of relationships that go back that far, these are people who knew you before you’ve become a fully formed person. They see you for your essence, they see you as you were at that young age, purely yourself without having fully developed into an actual person … They knew you before you became successful or a failure, or whatever … I think sometimes as an adult, you take people for what they do, and what they are now, instead of the whole picture of their lives. But the old friends who have known me forever, they know that part.” —the Huffington Post, July 2011
Greta Gerwig
“In college and right after college, there’s this sense that your friends are your family. It’s really painful in your late twenties when you realize that they’re not your family, and they’re going to make their own families.” —Village Voice, May 2013
Colette McBeth
“In adolescence when everyone is a riot of hormones and insecurities a group of close girlfriends is fertile breeding ground for resentments, unspoken competition, simmering jealousies. Your best friend can send your spirits soaring one moment and crush you with a word or gesture the next. She can do this in a way no one else can because she knows what buttons to press and boy does she push them. Like an itch you can’t scratch she has a way of getting under your skin … What I realise now in hindsight is that there is a natural ebb and flow to friendships. There are times you think there’s nothing left between you, that you’ve hit the bottom, but the special ones survive, find ways of restoring themselves.” —the Telegraph, July 2013
Margaret Cho
“In comedy, it’s such a male-dominated field … there’s not enough women to support each other’s work and so there’s so many fewer of us. I think because of that that female comics have a really intense, close friendship with each other. And sometimes intense rivalries between each other because there is a feeling that there is not enough of us or that if you acknowledge another woman’s success, your success is unexceptional. It’s a weird thing when you are a minority, all of the in-fighting that happens.” —Big Think
Sarah Jessica Parker
“I think so much reality television — and the women that dominate culture today — are pretty unfriendly towards one another. They use language that’s really objectionable and cruel and not supportive. I like to remember that Carrie and the other women in Sex and the City were really nice to each other … [Carrie] was a really good friend. That’s why they can forgive those very apparent flaws and [selfishness]. She was a deeply devoted friend, and I think women really respond to that kind of connection. I think we all want it, we all work towards having it, and we’re not always the very best friends we can be.” —Harper’s Bazaar U.K., April 2014
Emma Watson
“I still have friends from primary school. And my two best girlfriends are from secondary school. I don’t have to explain anything to them. I don’t have to apologize for anything. They know. There’s no judgment in any way.” —Seventeen, August 2011
Mindy Kaling
“One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three with whom you struggle to find things to talk about. We never needed best friend gear because I guess with real friends you don’t have to make it official. It just is.” —Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, September 2012
Oprah Winfrey
“If friends disappoint you over and over, that’s in large part your own fault. Once someone has shown a tendency to be self-centered, you need to recognize that and take care of yourself; people aren’t going to change simply because you want them to.” —Business Insider
Roxane Gay
“Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses — pretty but designed to SLOW women down.” —Bad Feminist, August 2014
Zooey Deschanel
“It makes me sad [when girls are bitchy]. Girls get competitive, as though there’s only one spot in the world for everything but that’s not true. We need to stick together and see there’s more to life than pleasing men. It’s important not to cut yourself off from female friendships. I think sometimes girls get scared of other girls, but you need each other.” —Cosmo U.K., July 2012
Reese Witherspoon
“I don’t know what I would have done so many times in my life if I hadn’t had my girlfriends. They have literally gotten me up out of bed, taken my clothes off, put me in the shower, dressed me, said, ‘Hey, you can do this,’ put my high heels on and pushed me out the door!” —In Touch, April 2013
Keira Knightley
“Well, female friendships are fucking extraordinary. They don’t have to be sexual to be intense love affairs. A breakup with a female friend can be more traumatic than a breakup with a lover.” —The Advocate, July 2014
Anne Hathaway
“I do believe that female friends can be worse to each other than male friends, simply because, for whatever reason, women have a stronger emotional language. We’re encouraged more to use that … We talk about what we’re feeling about deep things. Maybe they’re not even particularly deep, in the grand scheme of things, but they’re things that matter to us. So, when you give someone that power, you’re showing them where your buttons are. If you pick wrong, and someone turns around and short-circuits those buttons, I think it hurts more.” —Collider, January 2009
Gloria Steinem
“Women understand. We may share experiences, make jokes, paint pictures, and describe humiliations that mean nothing to men, but women understand. The odd thing about these deep and personal connections of women is that they often ignore barriers of age, economics, worldly experience, race, culture — all the barriers that, in male or mixed society, had seemed so difficult to cross.” —New York Magazine, December 1971
Kate Hudson
“We had this bridal shower for my sister-in-law, and my mom made this speech, and she said, ‘I want all the girls to look around the room and, even if you don’t know each other, even if you’re just getting to know each other, or even if it’s your sister, I want you to remember one thing: trust me. Men, they come and go. They always will. Hopefully, they stay. But, it’s the girl that’s sitting next to you, or the girl that’s sitting across from you, that’s going to get you through everything.’ … That’s really important — that idea of not losing sight, no matter where you go in your life with men, because women give a lot to men. We love relationships. We thrive in them, as we should. But, sometimes, you lose sight of the girls that are there for you, all the time, which we shouldn’t hold against any of our friends. I have a girlfriend right now, who’s off and running with somebody, but we’re always there [for each other]. When she’s ready to pick up the phone and go, ‘I don’t know what to do,’ we’re all there.” —Collider, January 2009
Elissa Schappell
“We certainly bond with each other in times of crisis or these times when we go through these big touchstone moments … and when we bond, in those really important, pivotal, transitional moments in our lives, we’re really vulnerable and therefore we give each other an awful lot of information about ourselves. And therefore we make ourselves uniquely equipped to really damage each other. We know where each other’s soft spots are.” —Forbes, April 2012
Dolly Alderton
“I would like to pause the story a moment to talk about ‘nothing will change.’ I’ve heard it said to me repeatedly by women I love during my 20s when they move in with boyfriends, get engaged, move abroad, get married, get pregnant. ‘Nothing will change.’ It drives me bananas. Everything will change. Everything will change. The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity and the intimacy of our friendship will change for ever.” —Everything I Know About Love
Nicole Kidman
“When I’ve been down on my knees and needed friends to get on planes or come and help me, that’s what they do. It’s a big thing to have had those friendships last for decades and decades.” —People, 2019
Amy Poehler
“Female friendships are the most important thing in your life. The best thing about your friends is they know you better than anyone and they still wanna hang out with you.” —TikTok, 2024
Kayleen Schaefer
“In going back and thinking about my friendships and hearing about other women’s, I see this: Our friends are not our second choices. They are our dates for Friday nights and for ex-boyfriends’ weddings. They are the visitors to our hometowns and hospital rooms. They are the first people we tell about any news, whether it’s good, terrible, or mundane. They are our plus-ones at office parties. They are the people we’re raising children with. They are our advocates, who, no matter what, make us feel like we won’t fail. They are the people who will struggle with us and who will stay with us. They are who we text when we get home.” —Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship
Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
“It can be extremely hard to figure out the right amount of growth and sacrifice to be devoting to a friendship, because we’re not taught that friends are worth stretching for at all. Your spouse? Definitely … Your family? There’s a therapist for that too. Friends though? When things get hard, it’s socially acceptable to abandon them with no conversation about it whatsoever, even if you’ve been intimate parts of each other’s lives for years.” —Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close
Michelle Obama
“Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses … swapped back and forth and over again.” —Becoming
Maya Angelou
“There’s a marked difference between acquaintances and friends. Most people really don’t become friends. They become deep and serious acquaintances. But in a friendship you get to know the spirit of another person; and your values coincide. Friends may disagree, but not about serious matters. A friend will stand for you when you are no longer able. A woman can say to herself, If I die, I know that my friend, my sister friend will be here to hold up the banner. Now that’s very profound.” —Essence, 2011
Pandora Sykes
“When my best friends had babies we were lucky that our friendships preexisted our new charges by decades. We never forgot who we once were to each other whilst embracing who we’d become. I may not have been able to see myself after my daughter’s birth but my best friends never lost sight of me.” —How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right: & Other Essays on Modern Life
Miranda July
“Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can’t see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.” —No One Belongs Here More Than You
Rashida Jones
“In my own life, my female friendships are incredibly anchoring for me. They orient my life in every single way … I was talking about this with a girlfriend the other day: We’re adults now and we can work out all of this stuff with each other. And even if we come into conflict, or we have issues, we can deal with it head-on because we love each other and it’s safe and we know that we’re going to care for each other’s feelings.” —InStyle, 2024
Maya Rudolph
“I give myself a lot of credit for the choices that I’ve made and the friendships that I’ve kept going. It says a lot about me. And I’m really grateful to myself for that because it’s looking out for yourself and it’s looking out to make sure that I have people in my life that I love and that I’m seen by. I’m really proud of myself for that.” —The Drew Barrymore Show, 2024
Shonda Rhimes
“I’ve had the same three best friends for the past 20 years. We grew up together, and we still get together for weekends. When you meet people in this business, they’re usually not really your friends. So I stick with my best friends and my sisters. Yes, they love the show, but they’re not too interested or impressed with all the attention that comes with it. Our conversations are about what’s going on with their husbands or kids. They keep the world real for me.” —O, The Oprah Magazine, 2006
Cleo Wade
“The thing I probably value most in life is my friendships, and I say that as a partner and a mother of two kids. Especially as a Black woman writer in the world, you think, God, I couldn’t have done this without Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou or Lucille Clifton. I couldn’t be a poet without Mary Oliver. But I want to focus on the day-to-dayness of friendship. Often we don’t give flowers to the people who are in the minute-to-minute smallness of life that creates our bigness of life. The people who always pick up that phone, who are always on your side, and who help you become who you are.” —Bustle, 2023
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