#overt

Now that you're an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurans and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you're told that you're "in your head too much", a phrase that's often deployed against the quiet and cerebral. Of course, there's another word for such people: thinkers. ↗

— Susan Cain

#thinkers #introvert

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. ↗

— Ariel Gore

#silence #socialization #talking #introvert

From books, I winnowed the glue that held together my psyche as it struggled to stay whole. It was from stories and myths that I learned to dream, to imagine a different life, to realize potentials and probabilities other than those of the painful, poverty-mired existence I found myself in as a child. With a book I could hide in a corner, safe from the heavy hand and belt of my stepfather, and for a while not worry about where our next meal would come from, or where we would be sleeping that night, or when my mother would break and have to be sent yet again to the mental institution. Books, for me, we tiny life rafts that I clung to desperately. ↗

— J. Don Cook

#poverty #real-life #dreams

There's a difference between preferring books to parties and preferring sixteen cats to seeing the light of day. ↗

— Lauren Morrill

#introverts #reading #humor

One of the great failings of the American education system (in our view) is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad. ↗

— Nicholas D. Kristof

#poverty #service #education

When I’m introduced to a woman for the first time, I always say the same thing. I say, “Hi, I’m Jarod, and I think you’ll love my kids. You’d better, because you’re going to give birth to them.” This usually works, because after I say this I can immediately go back to being an introvert, as I’m left standing there all alone. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#love

Love is essential, gregariousness is optional. ↗

— Susan Cain

#love #love

cross-national studies show that the U.S. poverty rate, which stands persistently above 12 percent, is not only the highest poverty rate of any advanced industrial nation, but is more than twice the average for that group. Pursuing the American Dream, 9, 276 ↗

— Cal Jillson

#poverty #dreams

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on. ↗

— Muhammad Yunus

#microfinance #poverty #social-business #society #business

If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty. ↗

— Muhammad Yunus

#poverty #poverty-alleviation #social-change #change