233 Quotes by Sherry Turkle

Hold on to your passion – you’ll need it!

The philosopher Heinrich von Kleist calls this “the gradual completion of thoughts while speaking.” Von Kleist quotes the French proverb that “appetite comes from eating” and observes that it is equally the case that “ideas come from speaking.” The best thoughts, in his view, can be almost unintelligible as they emerge; what matters most is risky, thrilling conversation as a crucible for discovery.

Texting is more direct. You don’t have to use conversation filler.

I call it the Goldilocks effect: We can’t get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance – not too close, not too far, just right. But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiency of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference.

A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, “There you go again; let’s call this to a halt. You can do something different.” Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect.

A woman in her late sixties described her new iPhone: “it’s like having a little time square in my pocketbook. All lights. All the people I could meet.

Anthropologist Victor Turner writes that we are most free to explore identity in places outside of our normal routines, places that are in some way “betwixt and between.” Turner calls them liminal, from the Latin word for “threshold.

Our new media are well suited for accomplishing the rudimentary. And because this is what technology serves up, we reduce our expectations of each other.

We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. Yet.