The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting.

Opposites attract, and I think temperament is so fundamental that you end up craving someone of the opposite temperament to complete you.

The next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the power of quiet.

Introverts need to trust their gut and share their ideas as powerfully as they can.

I had always imagined Rosa Parks as a stately woman with a bold temperament, someone who could easily stand up to a busload of glowering passengers. But when she died in 2005 at the age of ninety-two, the flood of obituaries recalled her as soft-spoken, sweet, and small in stature. They said she was "timid and shy" but had "the courage of a lion." They were full of phrases like "radical humility" and "quiet fortitude.

It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world.

You're told that you're in your head too much, a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Or maybe there's another word for such people: thinkers.