introvert
Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing…For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating.
“Caring for Your Introvert: The habits and needs of a little-understood group,” The Atlantic, March 2003.
Remember, someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts. It pays to learn the warning signs.
“Caring for Your Introvert: The habits and needs of a little-understood group,” The Atlantic, March 2003.
Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 119.
The most surprising and fascinating thing I learned is that there are “introverts” and “extroverts” throughout the animal kingdom—all the way down to the level of fruit flies!
“The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance,” interview with Gareth Cook, Scientific American, January 24, 2012.
Without introverts, the world would be devoid of:
the theory of gravity
the theory of relativity
W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”
Chopin’s nocturnes
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
Peter Pan
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm
The Cat in the Hat
Charlie Brown
Schindler’s List, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Google
Harry Potter
Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Cant Stop Talking, (New York: Crown, 2012), 5.
What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!
Gift from the Sea (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 50th anniversary ed., 43–44.
I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.
“Solitude,” in Walden: or, Life in the Woods (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus Company, 1899), 156.
Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone.
Gift from the Sea (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 50th anniversary ed., 44.
Digital media is an amplifier. It tends to make extroverts more extroverted and introverts more introverted.
“Seeing Social Media More as Portal Than as Pitfall,” New York Times, by Perri Klass, January 9, 2012.
You asked me to come and see you—I must speak of that. I thank you, A., but I don’t go from home, unless emergency leads me by the hand, and then I do it obstinately, and draw back if I can. Should I ever leave home, which is improbable, I will, with much delight, accept your invitation; till then, my dear A., my warmest thanks are yours, but don’t expect me.
ca. July 26, 1853 letter to Abiah Root, in Letters: Emily Dickinson, selected and ed. by Emily Fragos (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2011), 116.
I’m happier being outside the flow.
“The Mad Scientist of Smut,” by Charles McGrath, The New York Times, August 4, 2011.
All this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn’t think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.
The Edible Woman (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999), 112.