Susan Cain Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“We need to do teacher training to educate them about what temperament means. Shyness is painful and you want to help a child with shyness - but the underlying temperament of being a careful, sensitive person is to be honoured, valued and respected.”

“I get a lot of letters from introverts asking how they can meet people. The key is to make sure that you are doing things you enjoy.”

“I use a lot of old-fashioned expressions.”

“Men are more likely to be introverted than women are, but it's really very slight. But the real difference I think is in how it plays out, how it relates to cultural stereotypes.”

“What's interesting is relative levels of introversion tend to stay the same. If you went back to your reunion from school, you would probably find that if you ranked everyone in your class into terms of levels of introversion and extroversion you'd still be the same rank.”

“In a way, education by its nature favours the extrovert because you are taking kids and putting them into a big classroom, which is automatically going to be a high-stimulation environment. Probably the best way of teaching in general is one on one, but that's not something everyone can afford.”

“It's important for a parent to learn to take delight in a child whose behavior might seem mystifying. In the case of an extroverted parent with an introverted child, it can be learning to see the inner riches of your child that may not always be expressed on the surface - but are there.”

“To some extent, we've always had an admiration for extroversion in our culture. But the extrovert ideal really came to play at the turn of the 20th century when we had the rise of big business.”

“You will find this hard to believe, but I've never laughed as much as I did when I was a corporate lawyer. When you're working 16 hours a day for months at a time, you get punchy. Everything and everyone seems hilarious.”

“A widely held, but rarely articulated, belief in our society is that the ideal self is bold, alpha, gregarious. Introversion is viewed somewhere between disappointment and pathology.”