Friendship May And Often Does Grow

Recorded in Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington (1834), Lady Blessington's account of her conversations with Byron in Genoa in 1823, a year before his death in Greece. The remark is characteristic of Byron's epigrammatic wit — a witty inversion of the conventional comfort that disappointed love can settle into friendship. Byron had extensive experience of both relationships and their complications, and his letters and journals are full of similar aphoristic observations on love's asymmetry.