Susan Cain Quotes

Dreams are more real than reality itself, they're closer to the self.

The imagination is not an escape, but a return to the richness of our true selves; a return to reality.

We are what we seem to be.

Introverts keep their best stuff inside—that is, until it is ready. And this drives extroverts crazy! The explanation for the introvert’s behavior—and there must be an explanation for this behavior, say the extroverts—is that he or she is antisocial, out of touch, or simply a snob.

You can't just sing the song and live another life.

Introverts are offered keys to private gardens full of riches. To possess such a key is to tumble like Alice down her rabbit hole. She didn't choose to go to Wonderland - but she made of it an adventure that was fresh and fantastic and very much her own.

These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past

I am not what you see and hear.

Show is not substance; realities govern wise men.

Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth.

If I could get their attention long enough, I felt they would see beneath the boobs and find the heart, and that they would see beneath the wig and find the brains. I think one big part of whatever appeal I possess is the fact that I look totally one way and that I am totally another. I look artificial, but I'm not.

Stories," he'd said, his voice low and almost husky, "we are made up of stories. And even the one's that seem the most like lies can be our deepest hidden truths.

Make no mistake, the woman had a heart. She had a bigger one that people would think. There was a lot in it, stored up, high in miles of hidden shelving. Remember that she was the woman with the instrument strapped to her body in the long, moon-slit night.

Actions are not impostions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with

When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream.

Accepting the reality of our sinfulness means accepting our authentic self. Judas could not face his shadow; Peter could. The latter befriended the impostor within; the former raged against him.

The last introvert in a world of extroverts. Silence: my response to both emptiness and saturation. But silence frightens people. I had to learn how to talk. Out of politeness.

The world as we know it is falling apart at the seams, because it's an inadequate container for the truth of who we are.

Consciousness in the individual is that area where the totality of life is located.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us.

All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world.

You are what exists before all stories.

I understood that as much as I had resisted the outside, as much as I had constricted my life, as much as I had closed and narrowed the channels into me, there were still many takers for the quiet heart.

With comedy, you have to do it right. In a drama, there's a lot of different ways to succeed in a moment. But comedy comes from reality. You can't try to be funny.

The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.