27 YA Book Quotes About Friendship
For teenagers, friendships take on a level of importance that’s often unseen at other times in their lives. Friends are their closest confidants, their most intense relationships, and like family. We’ve been seeing a resurgence in great YA books about friendship over the last half decade or so for these reasons—there are great stories to be told about the development of these bonds, as well as the challenges that can arise within them, and the devastation that may come if they fall apart. So there’s no surprise that these books offer fantastic YA quotes about friendship that will resonate with teens and anyone who has ever experienced the highs, lows, and in-betweens of that kind of relationship.
Find below 27 of the most powerful and real YA quotes about friendship.
The Best YA Book Quotes About Friendship
1. Maybe what matters is not so much the path as who walks beside you. —Stacey Lee, Under A Painted Sky
2. Life is an awful, ugly place not to have a friend. —Sarah Dessen, Someone Like You
3. Parents don’t get that, though. They don’t understand about the fragility of teen friendships. They don’t understand how easy it is for things to break apart, how someone you thought would be by your side forever can just disappear, or turn on you, or decide she likes someone more than she likes you. Parents always talk about romantic relationships being so ephemeral and fleeting in high school. What they don’t get is that friendships can be the same way. —Lauren Barnholdt, The Thing About The Truth
4. It was almost comforting, this mutual acceptance of our secrets. —Kiera Cass, The Elite
5. It’s bullshit to think of friendship and romance as being different. They’re not. They’re just variations of the same love. Variations of the same desire to be close. —Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List
6. Don’t get so focused on where you’re going that you forget the people you’re traveling with. There’s no point reaching a destination if you arrive alone. —Shaun David Hutchinson, At The Edge of the Universe
7. The beautiful thing about best friends? They can tell when you don’t wanna talk, and they don’t push it. —Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
8. It is so good to have friends who understand how there is a time for crying and a time for laughing, and that sometimes the two are very close together. —Lois Lowry, A Summer To Die
9. Yet sometimes being a friend meant letting people do things that hurt, like putting distance between you, just because it made them happy. —Ann Aguire, Outpost
10. When you’re used to hanging out with a person every single day, a few days off can sometimes seem more like a few months. —Jason Reynolds, When I Was The Greatest
11. We have different interests, fit into different cliques, but the length of our friendship makes most of that unimportant. You go through enough with a person over a long enough period of time and they just become a part of who you are. —Lindsey Leavitt, Sean Griswold’s Head
12. How amazing it is that friendships can become so full that you can’t imagine what your life was like before them. —David Levithan, Love Is The Higher Law
13. I don’t reserve my friendship for perfect people. —Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising
14. You may be born into a family, but you walk into friendships. Some you’ll discover you should put behind you. Others are worth every risk. —Adam Silvera, They Both Die At The End
15. That’s the cool thing about having a best friend. They know what your pain feels like already, so you don’t have to explain it. —Susane Colasanti, Take Me There
16. Having a friend made everything else suck less. —Laurie Halse Anderson, The Knife of Never Letting Go
17. Good friendships are durable. They’re meant to survive the gaps and the growing pains. —Julie Murphy, Dumplin’
18. Maybe, the only thing that has to make sense
about being somebody’s friend
is that you help them be their best self
on any given day. That you give them a home
when they don’t want to be in their own.
—Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X
19. But people need lift, too. People don’t get moving, they don’t soar, they don’t achieve great heights, without someone buoying them up. —Elizabeth Wein, Rose Under Fire
20. Maybe all friendships don’t fizzle. Maybe, like the kaleidoscope, the colors just change. —Miranda Kenneally, Stealing Parker
21. That’s what friends do: they notice things. They’re there for each other. They see what parents don’t. —Nina LaCour, Hold Still
22. It can be tough with best friendships. You’re both growing and changing, and it’s hard to grow and change at the same rate. —Jenny Han, P. S. I Still Love You
23. In friendship we are all debtors. We all owe each other for a thousand small kindnesses, for little moments of grace in the chaos. —Emery Lord, The Start of You and Me
24. We didn’t talk about anything heavy or light. We were just there together. And that was enough. —Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being A Wallflower
25. I didn’t know it would be people you barely knew becoming friends that harbored you. And dreams you didn’t even know you had—coming true. I didn’t know it would be superpowers rising up out of tragedies, and perfect moments in a nearly empty classroom. —Jacqueline Woodson, Harbor Me
26. Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. —Allie Condie, Matched
27. Together, we will raise the dunes from the earth, and rain death from the sky. Together, we are capable of anything. —Hafsah Faizal, We Hunt The Flame
Want more great insight from YA books? You’ll want to check out these YA book quotes for every occasion, as well as these YA quotes about reading.
