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 nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all.
Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.
There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.
We form an association of brothers in all points of the globe ... yet there is one unseen that can hardly be felt, yet it weighs on us. Whence comes it? Where is it? No one knows ... or at least no one tells. This association is secret even to us the veterans of the Secret Societies.
One Best Book is Equal To Hundred Good Friends But One Good Friend is Equal To A Library.
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