## Metadata - Author: [[Susan Cain]] - Full Title: Quiet - Category: #books ## Highlights - The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. ([Location 244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=244)) - Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. ([Location 248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=248)) - Some of our greatest ideas, art, and inventions—from the theory of evolution to van Gogh’s sunflowers to the personal computer—came from quiet and cerebral people who knew how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to be found there. Without introverts, the world would be devoid of: the theory of gravity the theory of relativity W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” Chopin’s nocturnes Proust’s In Search of Lost Time Peter Pan Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm The Cat in the Hat Charlie Brown Schindler’s List, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind Google Harry Potter* ([Location 260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=260)) - As the science journalist Winifred Gallagher writes: “The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement. ([Location 271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=271)) - If you’re an introvert, you also know that the bias against quiet can cause deep psychic pain. As a child you might have overheard your parents apologize for your shyness. ([Location 287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=287)) - she was an introvert, and as such she had unique powers in negotiation—perhaps less obvious but no less formidable. She’d probably prepared more than everyone else. She had a quiet but firm speaking style. She rarely spoke without thinking. Being mild-mannered, she could take strong, even aggressive, positions while coming across as perfectly reasonable. And she tended to ask questions—lots of them—and actually listen to the answers, which, no matter what your personality, is crucial to strong negotiation. ([Location 323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=323)) - Laura tried to be constructive. “Are you saying that’s the only way to go? What if we took a different approach?” ([Location 332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=332)) - “I’ve never seen anyone so nice and so tough at the same time,” ([Location 341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=341)) - Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external life of people and activities. ([Location 351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=351)) - Many introverts are also “highly sensitive,” which sounds poetic, but is actually a technical term in psychology. If you are a sensitive sort, then you’re more apt than the average person to feel pleasantly overwhelmed by Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” or a well-turned phrase or an act of extraordinary kindness. You may be quicker than others to feel sickened by violence and ugliness, and you likely have a very strong conscience. ([Location 431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=431)) - Carnegie’s journey reflected a cultural evolution that reached a tipping point around the turn of the twentieth century, changing forever who we are and whom we admire, how we act at job interviews and what we look for in an employee, how we court our mates and raise our children. America had shifted from what the influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality—and opened up a Pandora’s Box of personal anxieties from which we would never quite recover. ([Location 497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=497)) - Americans revered action and were suspicious of intellect, associating the life of the mind with the languid, ineffectual European aristocracy they had left behind. ([Location 653](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=653)) - short allele adults have been shown to have more anxiety in the evening than others when they’ve had stressful days, but less anxiety on calm days. ([Location 2042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=2042)) - a high-reactive child’s ideal parent: someone who “can read your cues and respect your individuality; is warm and firm in placing demands on you without being harsh or hostile; promotes curiosity, academic achievement, delayed gratification, and self-control; and is not harsh, neglectful, or inconsistent.” ([Location 2054](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4WNL2&location=2054))