'Friendships are cultivated with all the care and dangerous fragility of any sustenance agriculture. There is the careful time of discerning and planting - and here wisdom and experience can bring only success - and not a little luck. There is the giving over of oneself in loyalty, the breaking up by betrayal, the hard and welcome corrections and growth, the difficult learning and respecting of limits as in all things, and longstanding reaping and replenishing. Friendship is a life's work.'
Ephraim Radner, A Time to Keep. p.185.
