Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes

Yeah, because I think it's more important just to inspire people to wake up one day and pick up a book and start feeling it out for themselves.

I was socially isolated as a kid. I had friends, but I wasn't very good at sports and that sort of thing so I became quite comfortable being by myself, exploring. The world was my private playground, and in it, I was supreme. Darwin, Faraday, Huxley and other great scientists were my companions.

I had become shy of life's bustle in my solitary retreat and was apprehensive at the thought of facing the world.

I spent a lot of my childhood in my own head, making up stories. I didn't have a lot of outside influences, so I was able to make my own decisions about what I wanted to do.

I am very slow to warm. I've always been sort of a loner. I didn't play team sports. I am better one-on-one than in big groups.

I plan on doing a lot more work on my own, and discovering and doing more.

Touring is just not normal for me. My personality is to never ever talk to people if I can help it.

I never think of the reader. I am curious about things; I need to find out, so off I go.

I'm very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.

Don't try to 'fix' the child's boredom - rather, let the child find his or her inner resources.

I'm a loner. I like to be alone. I'm socially awkward.

People aren't throwing themselves at me, but I also don't go out very much. Like, when I do go out, it's for breakfast, so it's a little hard to throw yourself at me during breakfast.

I'm a loner. I kind of like to be alone and do my work and, you know, be focused on my own things.

I can lack communication with people. I shy away from everybody. I always want to be alone.

My coaches - and even my parents - wanted to give me the space for exploration to see what I could do. Or even to see what I couldn't do and what I would want to learn how to do. It was always about inspiring me and giving me that freedom that you would want in childhood.

I'm basically as shy a person as I was when I once worked in an office in London in the late Sixties. I like my own company. I didn't need a lot of friends.

I discover a lot of things on my own.

How I have walked... day after day, and all alone, to see if there was not something among the old things which was new!

Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day.

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be inside it.

Train yourselves. Don't wait to be fed knowledge out of a book. Get out and seek it. Make explorations. Do your own research work. Train your hands and your mind. Become curious. Invent your own problems and solve them. You can see things going on all about you. Inquire into them. Seek out answers to your own questions. There are many phenomena going on in nature the explanation of which cannot be found in books. Find out why these phenomena take place. Information a boy gets by himself is enormously more valuable than that which is taught to him in school.

As an only child lacking siblings and playmates, I was alone a great deal of the time. Much of this was spent reading virtually anything I could get my hands on.

I sense from people that they get frustrated with me for not being out and about. But I guess I'm a shy boy.

I think I'm a very solitary person. To actually not be anonymous is a bit claustrophobic for me.