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.
Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.
The act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.
Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save itself. In reality, because it is spiritual and therefore faces a subtler enemy, it must, even more wholeheartedly than they, invoke the divine protection if it hopes to remain sweet. For consider how narrow its true path is. Is must not become what the people call a "mutual admiration society"; yet if it is not full of mutual admiration, of Appreciative love, it is not Friendship at all.
A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults.
Two are better than one,because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lif' up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.
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