Sherry Turkle Quotes

The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy.

~ Sherry Turkle

Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical.

~ Sherry Turkle

A sacred space is not a place to hide out. It is a place where we recognize ourselves and our commitments.

~ Sherry Turkle

To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.

~ Sherry Turkle

Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.

~ Sherry Turkle

It's too late to leave the future to the futurists.

~ Sherry Turkle

I miss those days even though I wasn't alive.

~ Sherry Turkle

The idea of being vulnerable leaves a lot of room for choice. There is always room to be less foldable, more evil.

~ Sherry Turkle

One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance.

~ Sherry Turkle

We expect more from technology and less from each other.

~ Sherry Turkle

We now expect more from technology and less from each other.

~ Sherry Turkle

Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.

~ Sherry Turkle

Overstimulated, we seek out constrained worlds.

~ Sherry Turkle

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

~ Sherry Turkle

Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real.

~ Sherry Turkle

The way we contemplate technology on the horizon says much about who we are and who we are willing to become.

~ Sherry Turkle

We go from curiosity to a search for communion.

~ Sherry Turkle

Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice.

~ Sherry Turkle

As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts.

~ Sherry Turkle

She had set it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber.

~ Sherry Turkle

This is what technology wants, it wants to be a symptom. Like all psychological symptoms, it obscures a problem by solving it without addressing it.

~ Sherry Turkle

Children make theories when they are confused or anxious.

~ Sherry Turkle

When young people are insecure, they find ways to manufacture love tests – personal metrics to reassure themselves.

~ Sherry Turkle

Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?

~ Sherry Turkle

Online life is practice to make the rest of life better, but it is also a pleasure in itself.

~ Sherry Turkle

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.

~ Sherry Turkle

If you're having a conversation with someone in speech, and it's not being tape-recorded, you can change your opinion, but on the Internet, it's not like that. On the Internet it's almost as if everything you say were being tape-recorded. You can't say, I changed my mind.

~ Sherry Turkle

We have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology's true effect on us.

~ Sherry Turkle

We see a first generation going through adolescence knowing their every misstep, all the awkward gestures of their youth, are being frozen in a computer's memory.

~ Sherry Turkle

Underestimation has its uses.

~ Sherry Turkle

We cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the least gifted of us has the incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate the range of human emotions. Why would we deprive ourselves of that?

~ Sherry Turkle

Children content with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.

~ Sherry Turkle

There is a rich literature on how to break out of quandary thinking. It suggests that sometimes it helps to turn from the abstract to the concrete.

~ Sherry Turkle

This is a new nonnegotiable: to feel safe, you have to be connected.

~ Sherry Turkle

In his history of solitude, Anthony Storr writes about the importance of being able to feel at peace in one's own company. But many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at a lake or beach or on a hike. Stillness makes them anxious. I see the beginnings of a backlash as some young people become disillusioned with social media. There is,. too, the renewed interest in yoga, Eastern religions, meditating, and slowness.

~ Sherry Turkle

Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available.

~ Sherry Turkle

You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true.

~ Sherry Turkle

He experiences a connection where knowledge does not interfere with wonder.

~ Sherry Turkle

I call it the Goldilocks effect: We can't get enough of each other 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.

~ Sherry Turkle

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.

~ Sherry Turkle