#introversion

How intense can be the longing to escape from the emptiness and dullness of human verbosity, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labour, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion! ↗

— Boris Pasternak

#peace #quiet #zhivago #music

Because loners are born everywhere, we end up living everywhere. We do not, have not, tended to single ourselves out as special, elite, requiring rarefied environments. Too often we have done the opposite; lived where we lived because our jobs were there, or families, or because we'd heard the schools were good there, or that we would love a place with changing seasons. Then, no matter what, we put our noses to the grindstone. We take living there as a fait accompli, a fact. Too often we are miserable somewhere without realizing why. We blame ourselves for not buckling down, settling in, fitting in. The problem is the place, but too often we do not see this, we will not allow ourselves to see this. It's the same old thing: This is a friendly town, so what's your problem? ...To the non-loner, or the self-reproaching loner, the fact of being a loner is not comparable to those other determinants. It is not a matter of life and death, we tell ourselves. It its not a matter of breathing or of execution by stoning. But home is the crucible of living...So how can living not be a matter of life and death? ↗

— Anneli Rufus

#home #introversion #change

...I also believe that introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward. ↗

— Susan Cain

#inner-life #introversion #loneliness #strengths #life

In “America the extroverted,” relationships are good, and even if they are very bad, they are better than no relationship. Introverts don’t think this way. Many of us want and have great relationships, but we generally prefer “no relationship” to a bad one. Quality matters. We conserve our relationship resources, because we know they are limited. ↗

— Laurie Helgoe

#life

...ultimately I found my community by pursuing what I loved: writing, acting, art, coffeehouses. ↗

— Laurie Helgoe

#art

In the day school she went to in New York she had long intimate conversations with them all in her imagination, but never in reality. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#imagination

I heard, for the first time— nothing. I danced and did somersaults, lay down in a bed of grass, felt the breeze. And for the first time, I heard my heart, and I knew who I was. ↗

— Laurie Helgoe

#life

What we share as introverts is the love of ideas and the desire to explore them with minimal interruption. We want and need input, but we’d rather get it through reading, research, and rich conversation than through unfiltered talk. ↗

— Laurie Helgoe

#life

Though I may be efficient at the family table, I linger at the table for two. ↗

— Laurie Helgoe

#family

Where else but cyberspace does the introvert have the opportunity to start in our comfort zone of written communication and talk later? ↗

— Laurie Helgoe

#communication