Quiet Quotes

“someone told her that at that pivotal moment she’d played a good game of something called “negotiation jujitsu”; but she knew that she was just doing what you learn to do naturally as a quiet person in a loudmouth world.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“she was an introvert, and as such she had unique powers in negotiation—”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“But public opinion was beside the point for Franklin and Eleanor. Each had strengths that the other craved—her empathy, his bravado. “E is an Angel,” Franklin wrote in his journal. When she accepted his marriage proposal in 1903, he proclaimed himself the happiest man alive. She responded with a flood of love letters. They were married in 1905 and went on to have six children.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Public Speaking–Social Anxiety Center of New York.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The stereotype of the university professor is accurate for so many people on campus. They like to read; for them there’s nothing more exciting than ideas. And some of this has to do with how they spent their time when they were growing up. If you spend a lot of time charging around, then you have less time for reading and learning. There’s only so much time in your life.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“For one thing, we should actively seek out symbiotic introvert-extrovert relationships, in which leadership and other tasks are divided according to people’s natural strengths and temperaments. The most effective teams are composed of a healthy mix of introverts and extroverts, studies show, and so are many leadership structures.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The amygdala serves as the brain’s emotional switchboard, receiving information from the senses and then signaling the rest of the brain and nervous system how to respond.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The wind howls, but the mountain remains still. —JAPANESE PROVERB
Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know. —LAO ZI, The Way of Lao Zi”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
—CARL JUNG”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“But just as the nature-nurture debate was replaced with interactionism—the insight that both factors contribute to who we are, and indeed influence each other—so has the person-situation debate been superseded by a more nuanced understanding”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“It’s because of relationship honoring, for example, that social anxiety disorder in Japan, known as taijin kyofusho, takes the form not of excessive worry about embarrassing oneself, as it does in the United States, but of embarrassing others.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“It’s as if extroverts are seeing “what is” while their introverted peers are asking “what if.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“many evangelicals come to associate godliness with sociability.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“If you don’t love Jesus out loud, then it must not be real love. It’s not enough to forge your own spiritual connection to the divine; it must be displayed publicly. Is it any wonder that introverts like Pastor McHugh start to question their own hearts?”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“For the early U.S. astronauts, having a low heart rate, which is associated with low reactivity, was a status symbol. Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn, who became the first American to orbit the Earth and would later run for president, was admired by his comrades for his supercool pulse rate during liftoff (only 110 beats per minute).”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“He “had gone through life with one skin fewer than most men,” the novelist Eric Malpass writes of his quiet and cerebral protagonist, also an author, in the novel The Long Long Dances. “The troubles of others moved him more, as did also the teeming beauty of life: moved him, compelled him, to seize a pen and write about them. [He was moved by] walking in the hills, listening to a Schubert impromptu, watching nightly from his armchair the smashing of bone and flesh that made up so much of the nine o’clock news.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“But with their natural ability to inspire, extroverted leaders are better at getting results from more passive workers.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Because of their inclination to listen to others and lack of interest in dominating social situations, introverts are more likely to hear and implement suggestions.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“University admissions officers looked not for the most exceptional candidates, but for the most extroverted. Harvard’s provost Paul Buck declared in the late 1940s that Harvard should reject the “sensitive, neurotic” type and the “intellectually over-stimulated” in favor of boys of the “healthy extrovert kind.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Well-meaning parents of the midcentury agreed that quiet was unacceptable and gregariousness ideal for both girls and boys. Some discouraged their children from solitary and serious hobbies, like classical music, that could make them unpopular. They sent their kids to school at increasingly young ages, where the main assignment was learning to socialize. Introverted children were often singled out as problem cases (a situation familiar to anyone with an introverted child today).”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Yet today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We’re told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts—which means that we’ve lost sight of who we really are.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“A shy man no doubt dreads the notice of strangers, but can hardly be said to be afraid of them. He may be as bold as a hero in battle, and yet have no self-confidence about trifles in the presence of strangers.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“They were utterly blind, in other words, to how much their peers had influenced them.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Participation places a very different set of demands on the brain than observing does. It requires a kind of mental multitasking: the ability to process a lot of short-term information at once without becoming distracted or overly stressed.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“In fact, people who value intimacy highly don’t tend to be, as the noted psychologist David Buss puts it, “the loud, outgoing, life-of-the-party extrovert.” They are more likely to be someone with a select group of close friends, who prefers “sincere and meaningful conversations over wild parties.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Emotional labor,” which is the effort we make to control and change our own emotions, is associated with stress, burnout, and even physical symptoms like an increase in cardiovascular disease.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“A Free Trait Agreement acknowledges that we’ll each act out of character some of the time—in exchange for being ourselves the rest of the time.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“where my regular seat became the foot of the table. That little bit of physical distance felt more comfortable to me, and let me read the room and comment from a perspective ever so slightly removed.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Restorative niche” is Professor Little’s term for the place you go when you want to return to your true self.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking