I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. Distrusting the approval of the chosen, I would take the applause of exiles anytime. My friends were all foreigners, and they wore their unbelongingness in their eyes. I hunted for that look; I saw it often, disarrayed and fragmentary and furious, and I approached every boy who invited me in. Pat Conroy
About This Quote

Mihnea is talking about his friends. He says that his friends are not popular among the mainstream crowd. He also says that he has a lot of friends from different backgrounds. Mihnea says that he has many friends who have a very different kind of popularity in the world.

They are in a sense very alone and sad. However, Mihnea doesn’t take this loneliness or sadness in to account when he approaches other people for friendship. In fact, he goes so far as to say that "exiles" have a higher level of popularity than "chosen people" because they have been exiled from the mainstream and so they have less to lose when they approach someone new for friendship.

Source: The Lords Of Discipline

Some Similar Quotes
  1. It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. - Friedrich Nietzsche
  2. There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature. - Jane Austen
  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
  5. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grassthe world is too full to talk about. - Jalaluddin Rumi
More Quotes By Pat Conroy
  1. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.
  2. I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.
  3. It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.
  4. The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.
  5. Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.
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