I certainly should have, ' he agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally-accepted bit of nonsense it is, that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you. As if there weren't far too much understanding in the world already; above all, that understanding between lovers, celebrated in song and story, which is actually such torture that no two of them can bear it without frequent separations or fights. Christopher Isherwood
About This Quote

In this quote, Henry James is writing about the idea that we should choose our best friends not according to their understanding of us but according to our understanding of them. If we choose friends who understand and accept us and who accept and understand us, how much better off we will be. Sadly, this is not always the case. We often make friends based on their understanding of our personality and what we like to do rather than who we really are. We make friends with those who share the same interests as us and those who like the same things as we do, but we don't consider our own best friend as one of those people.

Source: A Single Man

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  3. If I had a flower for every time I thought of you... I could walk through my garden forever. - Alfred Tennyson
  4. You are my best friend as well as my lover, and I do not know which side of you I enjoy the most. I treasure each side, just as I have treasured our life together. - Nicholas Sparks
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More Quotes By Christopher Isherwood
  1. Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging,...
  2. If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.
  3. An afternoon drive from Los Angeles will take you up into the high mountains, where eagles circle above the forests and the cold blue lakes, or out over the Mojave Desert, with its weird vegetation and immense vistas. Not very far away are Death Valley,...
  4. As they embrace, she kisses him full on the mouth. And suddenly sticks her tongue right in. She has done this before, often. It’s one of those drunken long shots which just might, at least theoretically, once in ten thousand tries, throw a relationship right...
  5. But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until – later of sooner – perhaps – no, not...
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