#intro

It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world. ↗

— Susan Cain

#introversion #sensitivities #tragedy

Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen. ↗

— Jonathan Lethem

#shy #love

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done? ↗

— Barbara Ehrenreich

#positive-thinking #self-help #self-improvement #love

Introverts living under the Extroversion Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform ↗

— Susan Cain

#psychology #oppression

An accusing heart couldn't see her own sins. ↗

— Toba Beta

#introspection #sins #introspection

Nothing is forever. Except atoms. ↗

— Dannika Dark

#forever #immortal #immortality #introspective #mageri

He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#introspection

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn ↗

— Robert Frost

#on-writing #reflection #introspection

Think of your head as an unsafe neighborhood; don't go there alone. ↗

— Augusten Burroughs

#therapy #introspection

I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#philosophy #society #weakness #introspection