Susan Cain

This book is about the melancholic direction, which I call the "bittersweet": a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.

Today we know that the reality is far more complex. For one thing, the ARAS doesn’t turn stimulation on and off like a fire truck’s hose, flooding the entire brain at once; different parts of the brain are aroused more than others at different times. Also, high arousal levels in the brain don’t always correlate with how aroused we feel. And there are many different kinds of arousal: arousal by loud music is not the same as arousal by mortar fire, which is not the same as arousal by presiding at a meeting; you might be more sensitive to one form of stimulation than to another. It’s also too simple to say that we always seek moderate levels of arousal: excited fans at a soccer game crave hyperstimulation, while people who visit spas for relaxation treatments seek low levels.*

How did a nation founded on so much heartache turn into a culture of normative smiles?

The world needs you and it needs the things you carry. So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly.

There's a reason that so many religions and wisdom traditions counsel meditating on death, and it's because there's almost nothing that delivers you so quickly to the preciousness of life than to think about death.

This is the next great diversity issue of our time.

We can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Bill Gates is never going to be Bill Clinton, no matter how he polishes his social skills, and Bill Clinton can never be Bill Gates, no matter how much time he spends alone with a computer.

We think we long for eternal life, but maybe what we're really longing for is perfect and unconditional love; a world in which lions actually do lay down with lambs; a world free of famines and floods, concentration camps and Gulag archipelagos; a world in which we grow up to love others in the same helplessly exuberant way we once loved our parents; a world in which we're forever adored like a precious baby; a world built on an entirely different logic from our own, one in which life needn't eat life in order to survive.

The very highest states—of awe and joy, wonder and love, meaning and creativity—emerge from this bittersweet nature of reality. We experience them not because life is perfect—but because it's not.

Whatever pain you can't get rid of, make it your creative offering.

Living in a bittersweet state, with an intense awareness of life's fragility and the pain of separation, is an underappreciated strength and an unexpected path to wisdom, joy, and especially communion.

Being able to exist in a place where light and dark meet is actually not a recipe for unhappiness. It is a recipe for a deeper kind of happiness.