"Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they ar not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know." - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
"Give me a few friends who will love me for what I am, or am not, and keep ever burning before my wandering steps the kindly light of hope." - Unknown.
"I don't remember when I first began to call you 'friend'. One day, I only know, the vague companionship that I'd seen grow so imperceptibly, turned gold, and ran in tune with all I'd thought or dared to plan." - Florence Steigerwait.
"To know someone here or there with whom you feel there is an understanding in spite of thoughts unexpressed - that can make of this earth a garden." - Goethe
"Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good times and bad. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses. Love is content with the present, it hopes for the future and it doesn't brood over the past. It's the day-in-day-out chronicles of irritations, problems, compromises, small disappointments, big victories and common goals. If you have love in your life, it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don't have it, no matter what else there is, it's not enough." - Anne Landers.
"The deepest need of man is to overcome his seperateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness." - Erich Fromme.
"Life's most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others?." - Martin Luther King Jr.
"If you would be loved, love and be loveable." - Ben Franklin.
"The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him." - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
"What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?" - George Elliot
"There need not be a destination or an agenda - just a road or a trail or maybe just intuition - and stops along the way to work, rest, read, dance, laugh and watch the sun come up on all the possibilities." - Anonymous.
years, but now just thinking about being up high makes my hands sweat. I find too, in periods of introspection, that my acrophobia superimposes less tangibly in my success paradigm, my worldview of "good" and "bad". I quaver at the thought of leadership, of attempting a new skill set, of persistence in nearly any sphere because I am terrified of failing, of falling. I demure from taking a stand, putting myself out there as a definitive, preferring the safety of remaining a wandering generality. I am afraid of being good, because I am bent toward being bad - eventually I will fall, and I'm not strong enough to face the resulting castigation. 
The pressure to succeed, however, to take a stand and to be good, is overwhelming. I find myself splitting - slowly, at first, but gaining speed in a great, shredding rip of presentable "good" me and unpresentable "bad" me. The dichotomy is killing me - I don't know where to turn for healing. I am nearly paralyzed, numbly performing the increasingly difficult chore of patching together enough "good" to show the world while the "bad" lurks in the shadows, impatiently waiting to come out. Knowing the inevitability of disappointing those who know only the "good", I drift on before the "bad" can reveal itself. But what if I can't drift anymore? What happens when the bad overwhelms the good and my 
locked-in sphere of influence wholly sees me? My thinking is that sphere would dwindle to just me - lonely, perhaps, but blessedly free of the pressure to perform ever greater feats of goodness, to climb ever higher on a crumbly rock face only I can see the dangers of. I'm terrified of being good because I know I am not.
