Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.

Nin suggests that friendship is not merely companionship but a creative, formative force: each person we befriend draws out latent capacities, memories, desires, and ways of seeing that might otherwise remain dormant. A “world in us” implies an inner landscape—values, sensibilities, even versions of the self—that becomes real through relationship. The line also reframes identity as relational rather than fixed: who we are is partly co-authored by the people who enter our lives. In this view, friends do not just share our existing world; they help bring new inner worlds into being, expanding the self’s emotional and imaginative range.