Yuxiang Wei

“For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence. The”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“That the Hawkings were eccentric, even odd, was well known; that they were aloof, convinced of their own intellectual superiority over the rest of the human race, was also widely recognized in St Albans, where they were regarded with a mixture of suspicion and awe. There were upsets and outbursts and there had been tensions in the air at the time of our engagement and the wedding, but these I took as part of the general tenor of family life. I had no substantial reason to complain of the way they treated me. Indeed, as I told Herman, they always seemed delighted to see Stephen and me, and always welcomed us warmly to Hillside Road.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“They talked to him in his own intellectual terms, sometimes caustically sarcastic, sometimes crushingly critical, always humorous. In personal terms, however, they treated him with a gentle consideration which was almost loving.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“Even T. S. Eliot’s famous 1915 poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—in which he laments the need to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”—seems a cri de coeur about the new demands of self-presentation. While poets of the previous century had wandered lonely as a cloud through the countryside (Wordsworth, in 1802) or repaired in solitude to Walden Pond (Thoreau, in 1845), Eliot’s Prufrock mostly worries about being looked at by “eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase” and pin you, wriggling, to a wall.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking