Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company for very long.
Interpretation
Choose your friends wisely, as their presence greatly affects your happiness and well-being.
This quote emphasizes the importance of selecting companions who resonate with you on a deeper level, suggesting that meaningful relationships enrich our lives. It highlights that superficial connections may lead to dissatisfaction, while bonds formed through love and mutual respect foster enduring joy.
In practice
In a speech about the value of friendship, one might quote Anne Rice to highlight the importance of choosing friends wisely.
From my stone pillow I have dreamed dreams of the mortal world above. I have heard its voices, its new music, as lullabies as I lie in my grave. I have envisioned its fantastical discoveries. I have known its courage in the timeless sanctum of my thoughts. And though it shuts me out with its dazzling forms, I long for one with the strength to roam it fearlessly, to ride the Devil's Road through its heart.
We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.
And so this young one, this young one whom I had so loved, I had to forsake, no matter how broken my heart, no matter how lonely my soul, no matter how bruised my intellect and spirit.
Dear God, help me. Do not forget me on this tiny cinder lost in a galaxy that is lost–a heart no bigger than a speck of dust beating, beating against death, against meaninglessness, against guilt, against sorrow.
The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.
In the very depths of Hell, do not demons love one another?
The Lord Jesus is "a friend who never changes." There is no fickleness about Him: those whom He loves, He loves to the end.
When somebody shares, everybody wins.
As the years progress one increasingly realises the importance of friendship and human solidarity. And if a 90-year-old may offer some unsolicited advice on this occasion, it would be that you, irrespective of your age, should place human solidarity, the concern for the other, at the centre of the values by which you live.
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
It is important to have friends we can trust. But it is essential to trust the Lord, who never lets us down.
from you, my dear Erasmus, let me obtain this request, that just as I bear with your ignorance in these matters, so you in turn will bear with my lack of eloquence.
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