"Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. The older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young"
About this Quote
The “precious few” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not a call to hoard every connection or to romanticize permanence. It’s a reminder to practice deliberate maintenance in a culture that treats friendship like a flexible subscription: cancel when inconvenient, re-up when lonely. Schmich’s subtext is that adult life encourages a kind of social amnesia, where you’re constantly reintroducing yourself in new settings. People who knew you young carry an archive that can’t be replicated by new acquaintances, no matter how compatible your politics or hobbies are. They remember your pre-brand self.
Context matters: Schmich wrote “Wear Sunscreen,” a piece that became famous partly because it sounded like a commencement speech for a generation learning that freedom also means fragmentation. This quote reads like a corrective to the curated reinvention economy. As you age, the people who knew you early become a stabilizing force not because they’re nostalgic props, but because they anchor your story when everything else keeps asking you to start over.
Quote Details
| Topic | Friendship |
|---|---|
| Source | Mary Schmich, column "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young" (commonly known as "Wear Sunscreen"), Chicago Tribune, June 1, 1997. |
| Cite | Cite this Quote |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Schmich, Mary. (n.d.). Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. The older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/understand-that-friends-come-and-go-but-with-a-97286/
Chicago Style
Schmich, Mary. "Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. The older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young." FixQuotes. Accessed February 1, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/understand-that-friends-come-and-go-but-with-a-97286/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. The older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/understand-that-friends-come-and-go-but-with-a-97286/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2026.
