Susan Cain

Human beings are a meaning-making species.

I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country.

Introversion — along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness — is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.

We listen to sad music for the same reason we go to church or synagogue or the mosque. We long for the Garden of Eden, we long for Mecca, we long for Zion because we come into this world with the sense that there is a more perfect and beautiful world to which we belong, where we are no longer.

Most introverts aren’t aware of how they are constantly spending their time in ways that they would prefer not to be. They’ve been doing it all their lives, so it just becomes second nature. I’m trying to give people entitlement inside their own minds to be who they are.

Everyone shines, given the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight, for others, a lamplit desk.

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place.

Love is essential, gregariousness is optional.

We have a two-tier class system when it comes to personality style. To devalue introversion is a waste of talent, energy and happiness.

We (introverts) are not anti-social; we’re differently social.

Shyness is the fear of negative judgment, while introversion is simply the preference for less stimulation. Shyness is inherently uncomfortable; introversion is not. The traits do overlap, though psychologists debate to what degree.

We moved from what cultural historians call a culture of character to a culture of personality. During the culture of character, what was important was the good deeds that you performed when nobody was looking. … But at the turn of the (20th) century, when we moved into this culture of personality, suddenly what was admired was to be magnetic and charismatic.