Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain.
ATTRIBUTION:
Nicholson Baker (b. 1957), U.S. author. U And I: A True Story, ch. 4 (1991).
