"this note of confession will of course play a larger and larger role in friendship in our day - a day that has seen what i think it accurate to call the triumph of the therapeutic, in which a friend, as like as not several friends, serve one another as surrogate psychotherapists, to whom to recount disappointments, secrets, troubles little and large, so that the word 'intimacy,' so long associated with friendship, has also become nearly synonymous with 'confessional.'"

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"in some ways, one of the greatest enemies of friendship is the family as we have come to conceive of it over the past forty or so years. often one feels closer to friends than one does to brothers and sisters. yet, ironically, none of the few ways we have to describe the intensity of friendship is to say of a friend that 'he is like a brother to me,' or 'she is like a member of the family.'"
-joseph epstein, friendship: an expose-