Friendship

Friendship is often an amusement, sometimes an education, at least a reprieve from loneliness, at best a human connection of the highest and grandest kind. Contradiction is implicit is the very nature of modern friendship. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the sign of an intelligent person is the ability to keep two contradictory ideas in his head at the same time and still function. With friendship, the two contradictory ideas are these: first, friends can be an immense complication, a huge burden, and a royal pain in the arse; and second, without friendship, make no mistake about it, we are all lost.

-Joseph Epstein, Friendship: An Expose , pg. 251