One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.
Interpretation
True friendship is characterized by a deep understanding where unspoken thoughts and feelings are shared.
Clifton Fadiman's quote emphasizes that the essence of friendship is not about the quantity of conversations or topics discussed, but rather the comfort and familiarity between friends that allows them to communicate without words. It highlights the understanding that grows over time, suggesting that real friends can share a silence or mutual understanding of important matters without needing to articulate them.
In practice
During a heartfelt moment at a wedding toast.
To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.
Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself.
There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.
The crest and crowning of all good, life's final star, is Brotherhood.
Friendship embraces innumerable ends; turn where you will it is ever at your side; no barrier shuts it out; it is never untimely and never in the way.
And much more am I sorrier for my good knights' loss than for the loss of my fair queen; for queens I might have enough, but such a fellowship of good knights shall never be together in no company.
God is not so wary as we, else He would give us no friends, lest we forget Him! The charms of the heaven in the bush are superseded, I fear, by the heaven in the hand, occasionally.
When I went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and made a few friends.
Come, Mr. Frodo!' he cried. 'I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you and it as well. So up you get! Come on, Mr. Frodo dear! Sam will give you a ride. Just tell him where to go, and he'll go
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