A tough hide. Grow it early. Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another.