Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
Interpretation
Friendships can be as significant as family, emphasizing the bonds we choose to create.
This quote by Salman Rushdie highlights the importance of friendships in our lives, suggesting that the connections we choose to make can be as profound and meaningful as those we are born into. It advocates for valuing elective affinities—our friendships—as a vital part of our emotional support and social structure, reflecting the idea that we can create our own 'family' through chosen relationships.
In practice
In a speech highlighting the importance of chosen family, this quote could emphasize the strength of friendships.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time his world had not been born yet.
We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way. If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big.
Every record I have done was because I was a person's friend. The only time we did not continue to be friends was if the record did not become a hit. If it did, we became great friends.
I want to be distinguished from the rest; to tell the truth, a friend to all mankind is not a friend for me.
It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not.
That's the problem with winning right from the start, thought Ender. you lose friends.
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