A Shy Person Quotes & Sayings

If I wanted to go be social I would. I don't have any fear of that. I don't feel like I'm a shy person at all. — Tobey Maguire

She groaned and tucked her fingers between my side and the mattress. "I don't think I'm ever going to get used to the cold air here."
I chuckled and kissed her forehead. "Just wait 'til it snows."
"Ugh," she moaned.
"I'll turn the heat up," I said and started to move from beneath her. She clutched me closer and made a sound of determination. I laughed. It thrilled the shit out of me that she liked having me so close. "I thought you were cold," I said affectionately.
"But you're warm."
"I'll come right back."
"Kiss me," she demanded. She was definitely a shy person, but the more time we spent together, the less shy she was with me when we were alone. I loved it. It was like getting a glimpse of the person no one else saw. — Cambria Hebert

I must have wondered if the police were right, if the entire story was a figment of my imagination. This is the worst impact of severe trauma: the victim loses faith in the evidence of her own senses. And this is the great gift Paul Macone gave to me. He believed what I told the police back then. He believed me enough to try to solve the case, and he did.
Perhaps because I've sought out evil in this world, attempting to understand and tame it, I am particularly moved by goodness. There is a light that animates an act of generosity, when a person is kind - not to call attention to his own goodness, or to make a pact with God, but just because he feels it's right. I see this light in Paul Macone. Still, his kindness is almost too much to bear. I feel shy around him, despite this conversation. I even feel shy writing this down. (184) — Jessica Stern

I am shy by nature, a person who's always found something burdensome about human interaction and who probably always will, at least to some degree. — Caroline Knapp

I was a painfully shy person in my pre-acting days. — Lucy Deakins

Some people are just quiet - they don't need to be talking all the time and aren't extroverted, but they're not necessarily afraid to talk. I'm not really a shy person. — Chirlane McCray

I'm basically a pretty shy person and I don't dance or get into fights. But there are all these things inside me that get out when I perform. It's like a real world when I play, here I can do all the things that I can't do in real life. — Bill Frisell

Until recently I barely even knew the signs of welcome, like the way a person plopped down across from me and sighed deeply while looking at me with relief: a shy look on someone's face that gave me time to breathe and settle in. I didn't know that wounds and scars were what we find welcoming, because they are like ours. Trappings and charm wear off, I've learned. The book of welcome says, Let people see you. — Anne Lamott

It may, at first sight, be matter of surprise to the thoughtless few that Mr Brass, being a professional gentleman, should not have legally indicted some party or parties, active in the promotion of the nuisance, but they will be good enough to remember, that as Doctors seldom take their own prescriptions, and Divines do not always practise what they preach, so lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties of close shaving, than for its always shaving the right person. — Charles Dickens

A Coy Aversion

...a flutter
too shy
to be seen... — Muse

I'm really a shy person. — Si Robertson

He's holding an armful of pink tulips and wearing a hungry, focused expression. His blue eyes
travel up and down over my body, and I feel almost shy under his gaze.
"You're a goddess."
He says it like a normal person would say, "Your dress is white. — Liz Reinhardt

The truth is that to enjoy acting one must be an exhibitionist at heart, one must revel in those exposures of the emotions which would be agonizing to a shy or reserved person. All the great actors have been and are exhibitionists. — Leslie Howard

I hate the word shy. I don't ever use that word. Shy was when I was seven and my one Princess signature got smeared across the pastel yellow page because I dripped tears all over it, because I was afraid and couldn't lift my head no matter how much I wanted to. That's how the shyness works. You want to talk, but you can't. People look at you with scorn. Being ice princess is infinitely better, even if some people think you're a total bitch. A snob. Reserved. Those are choices a person makes, to be reserved, to be quiet, or to be a snob. Shy isn't a choice. — Bethany Griffin

I want to resume the life of a shy person. — Garrison Keillor

Could it be that we don't want to think badly of Woodrow Wilson? We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be an inspiration only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We don't want complicated icons. "People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions," Helen Keller pointed out. "Conclusions are not always pleasant."41 Most of us automatically shy away from conflict, and understandably so. We particularly seek to avoid conflict in the classroom. — James W. Loewen

I'd always leaned toward the shy side but was never unsocial until I started seeing visions of people from the past. It's a really strange existence, not knowing if the person you're talking to is physically there or not. Not knowing if you're one hallucination away from a psychotic break. — Myra McEntire

I'm not a real social person - I'm shy - and a lot of the business is just social. — Kim Basinger

It seems like a contradiction, but the shy person who is a performer actually does make sense, because in a way, when you're young and shy, making people laugh is a good way to make friends. It's an instant connection. — Paul Merton

Maya's character was different. Although she was beautiful and stood out of the crowd, she was a very shy person. The siblings got along quite well, but in many ways they were absolutely opposites. Maya was always hesitant and thought before she started anything new and Joey was very spontaneous. He acted before he thought about consequences and so they disagreed often and it took them always a while to agree on something. — Gloria Tesch

I'm actually a very shy person, which is why I always chose to be in the kitchen. You can make people happy and entertain them, without really being there. You can make a very short appearance and then say, 'I've got something on the stove, gotta go!' — Giada De Laurentiis

I actually think of myself as quite a shy person, although I know I give the impression of someone much more confident. I think what I do have is a capacity to listen to the other, even if the other is an opponent. That leads, in all senses of the word, to an engagement. — John Berger

I'm a shy person. I don't know if it's in my DNA to share with the world. — Lisa Bonet

I hate to think of a day where a compelling book or a compelling authorial voice would be lost simply because that person doesn't have a Web site. But I think that, to use the Internet in a positive way, to turn people on to reading, is something that authors shouldn't really shy away from necessarily. — Marisha Pessl

I have to be a lot more calculating because I'm a very private person. I actually really struggle with the attention; I'm generally a pretty shy kind of a person. So it's tough figuring out how to manage it. But there are ways of managing it, and you just have to be smart. — Emily Watson

Michael Jordan on the court is a completely different guy. If the play requires him to leap out all the way and grab the ball, that's what he'll do. He may be a completely shy, withdrawn sort of person [off the court]. — Mos Def

I've always been passionately in love with movies, to such a degree that even as a young person of about nineteen or twenty I thought maybe I would try to become a film director. The reason I didn't do it was because I felt I didn't have the right personality. At that time in my life, I was mortally shy. — Jonathan Lethem

Dear Miss Smallwood, I thought it was time you received a real love letter. I am too shy to speak to you of my feelings in person, but I want you to know how pleased I am you are with us. You have an ardent admirer here at Ebbington Manor. I will be watching you. For I could gaze upon your soft green eyes and sweet lips forever. Your Secret Admirer — Julie Klassen

It was an interesting process trying to get Bob to talk about the film because he's such a shy person. He generally likes to talk when he really knows he has something to say. — Jay Roach

From the core, I'm a shy person, but when I'm on stage, I know how to put it aside. Of course, I'm not perfect, but I've definitely grown as far as being comfortable on stage. — Leon Bridges

I've always had to conquer fear when I'm on stage. Basically, I was and still am a very shy person. It's absolutely in conflict with what I do. But once I deliver the first joke I'm okay. It's like I'm out there all by myself just delivering my lines to nobody in particular without ever trying to notice the audience in front of me. — Steven Wright

As a child, people were always trying to photograph and film me because it's a way for a shy person to find themselves. — Bruce Weber

Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity? — Honore De Balzac

If you're not careful people will judge you based on these appearances and they will pigeon hole you that this is the person that you are. Your shy, your aggressive, your this type or that type and you lose the control of the dynamic, they become the ones that determine who you are. A powerful person never loses control of the dynamic they are in someway in control. — Robert Greene

I'm a very shy person and I never tried to do theater. — Sophia Loren

I saw all the suffering that Kurt Cobain went through. I saw this real vibrant person turn into a real shy, timid, withdrawn person. — Layne Staley

But for all their differences, shyness and introversion have in common something profound. The mental state of a shy extrovert sitting quietly in a business meeting may be very different from that of a calm introvert - the shy person is afraid to speak up, while the introvert is simply overstimulated - but to the outside world, the two appear to be the same. This can give both types insight into how our reverence for alpha status blinds us to things that are good and smart and wise. — Susan Cain

I'm quite shy. Really. I'm trying to expand myself as a person more, get involved with people. — Colin Mochrie

I always told myself I didn't do it because I don't hold with hitting women. I still don't. But when a person-man or woman-turns into a dog and begins to bite, someone has to shy it off. — Stephen King

People think that I'm a really outgoing person because of how I am on stage. But I'm not. I'm really shy. — Joel Madden

I've learned the importance of speaking up for myself and voicing my opinions and my ideas. I'm definitely a shy person. — Fiona Gubelmann

I am critical of myself like everyone else. You go to a movie theater and you are forty feet high. I had bad skin as a teenager and I am a shy person, but I think I am in the perfect business to fight my insecurities. You have to learn to love yourself and say 'I am pretty cool' instead of being so critical. You can easily fall into the trap of doing that. — Chris Pine

I've always found Mr. Disney to be somewhat of a shy person, a kid at heart. — Annette Funicello

What is the secret mesmerism which friendship possesses, and under the operation of which a person ordinarily sluggish, or cold, or timid, becomes wise, active, and resolute, in another's behalf? As Alexis, after a few passes from Dr. Elliotson, despises pain, reads with the back of his head, sees miles off, looks into next week, and performs other wonders, of which, in his own private normal condition, he is quite incapable; so you see, in the affairs of the world and under the magnetism of friendships, the modest man becomes bold, the shy confident, the lazy active, or the impetuous prudent and peaceful. What — William Makepeace Thackeray

God doesn't want us to live timid, shy, weak, wimpy, fearful, boring lives. He wants us to be bold, con dent and courageous, unafraid to try new things. And it never ceases to amaze me what God will do through a person who simply steps out in faith. — Joyce Meyer

I had so many secrets and so much social repression throughout my life. I guess I'm just a shy person and feel like my true self is unacceptable to most people. — Ezra Furman

And so they easily suppose that this truce, owing to helplessness, is victory and that they have convinced the other man. But in fact, instead of winning him over, they have merely applied a kind of shock therapy - only it was never 'therapy.' They have smothered the first little flame of a man's own spiritual life and a first shy question with the fire extinguisher of their erudition. By such performances a person can really be smothered and strangled! — Helmut Thielicke

My job is designing shoes. It's work that happens behind the scenes, as they say, and that suits me just fine because in general I am a shy person. But sometimes I have these extroverted outbursts. — Christian Louboutin

Shy, all those things you listed don't make a person. They don't. I mean it. You're beautiful, both inside and outside, but please don't look at me to validate that. You have to know it for yourself. -Taylor Holden, Strapped. — Nina G. Jones

I am really a loner after all; I am really not a social person. Because of my job, people think I am out every night, but I really hate all that. I am somebody who likes to be alone and see some close friends. I am a shy and introspective person. — Tom Ford

Roller Boogie is a relic from - when else? - the '70s. This is a tape I made for the eight-grade dance. The tape still plays, even if the cogs are a little creaky and the sound quality is dismal. It's a ninety-minute TDK Compact Cassette, and like everything else made in the '70s, it's beige. It takes me back to the fall of 1979, when I was a shy, spastic, corduroy-clad Catholic kid from the suburbs of Boston, grief-stricken over the '78 Red Sox. The words "douche" and "bag" have never coupled as passionately as they did in the person of my thirteen-yer-old self. My body, my brain, my elbows that stuck out like switchblades, my feet that got tangled in my bike spokes, but most of all my soul - these formed the waterbed where douchitude and bagness made love sweet love with all the feral intensity of Burt Reynolds and Rachel Ward in Sharkey's Machine. — Rob Sheffield

I'm a shy person, so I get really nervous going into interviews. — Skylar Grey

Greta knows that for me there are no good parties. I'm okay with one or two people, but more than that and I turn into a naked mole rat. That's what being shy feels like. Like my skin is too thin, the light too bright. Like the best place I could possibly be is in a tunnel far under the cool, dark earth. Someone asks me a question and I stare at them, empty-faced, my brain jammed up with how hard I'm trying to find something interesting to say. And in the end, all I can do is nod or shrug, because the light of their eyes looking at me, waiting for me, is just too much to take. And then it's over and there's one more person in the world who thinks I'm a complete and total waste of space. — Carol Rifka Brunt

A new person in your life gives the rest of you a chance to be new, too. Your life can be whatever you want it to, from there on out. I leaned in and kissed and that is who I was to him, not shy, but bold. Not inhibited, but brave. I was that to him and so I kept being that. It was what I thought he wanted and what he was attracted to, and yet it was this, this exact thing I wasn't even really, that made him the most insecure. — Deb Caletti

Yes I might have been quiet and shy, the kind of person who did my best to keep my head down just to get through the day. But even then, I had never let people walk all over me. Even in the days when I didn't know a left hook from a karate kick, I'd still always found my own ways of fighting for the things I believed in" -Amy — Danielle Paige

When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God. — Nathaniel Philbrick

My husband and I have known each other since kindergarten. I had a crush on him in school, but we never dated. Then we saw each other again after high school, and there was something instantly familiar about him. I'm a very shy person and was very closed off. But he allowed me to be myself. And there's a safety in that. — Alison Sweeney

I was a skinny, scrawny guy. I stuttered horrendously, couldn't speak at all. I was a very shy, reserved player and a very shy, reserved person. I found a safe place in life in basketball. — Bill Walton

I think that you may find that Tamera's a little more vibrant and energetic, but I'm much more likely to go up to a person and say, 'Hi, I'm Tia, nice to meet you.' Whereas Tamera is like ... well ... she's a little shy. She's down to earth. I'm more extroverted and she's more introverted when meeting people. — Tia Mowry

I'm very shy. I know it's weird for a person who models lingerie and swimsuits, but I don't like to be the center of attention! — Marisa Miller

I'm a very protective person and I'm very, I don't want to say shy, but I tend to fall for people once I've been around them for a minute because I trust them and I'm willing to let them into my world a little more, so I can definitely say I've fallen for a friend. — Chelsea Kane

I am not a people person. It's not that I am shy, but I am more comfortable in an atmosphere of one-on-one. I hate crowds and parties. — Bethany Joy Lenz

I like to have my privacy. I don't like people knowing what I do in my free time. I am also a very shy person, but I understand that people want to know more. — Ana Ivanovic

In real life I'm obviously a lot more shy, but once I'm on set and in costume and I'm hidden behind the person I'm playing I feel quite free to experiment. — Isla Fisher

The best thing that can happen to me when I'm writing fiction is to lose sight of the fact that I'm writing at all. It's as though I enter into a kind of trance. I know I'm writing, but I don't THINK about it. I just let my fingers type
it's as though the feeling comes out directly through them, bypassing the brain altogether. When that happens, I feel completely transported. There is nothing else like this feeling, very little else is more important to me. That intimacy I feel between myself and my work is what makes me feel at home on the earth. I am basically a shy person, basically a loner and an outsider; and I have been all my life. But when I achieve the kind of connection I can through writing, I feel I'm sitting in the lap of God. — Elizabeth Berg

Thirty-seven of them will be about shy, reclusive pennsylvania dutch lesbian who wants to write, told first-person by a lecherous hired hand. In dialect. — J.D. Salinger

Being a shy person, I always felt strange outside with my camera. — Kim Weston

I never met a person as determined as my mother. From working hard for six kids to just trying to keep the household down or maintain my father's discipline, my dad, I'm so much like my father too. My father was so introverted, quiet, shy, nice. I got attributes from my father and mother. — Sugar Ray Leonard

One of the best places for a shy person to meet people is in a coffee shop. If you are a reader, bring a book and read it there - that gives a guy something to ask you about. Same goes for sketching, writing, or any hobby you can take with you. — Laurie Helgoe

I think, for a shy person - and I was very shy until my mid-20s - having been to an all-girls' school is not brilliant on the boyfriend front later. Because when I went to university, it was definitely like meeting a new species of people. Suddenly, at age 19, I was thinking: 'Can you speak to these people?' I was very, very nervous. — Miranda Hart

Every shy person is a potential sex offender. — Nelson Rodrigues

You may be astonished that in such a short period of time I could go from weeping over the muffled killing of a flying fish to gleefully bludgeoning to death a dorado. I could explain it by arguing that profiting from a pitiful flying fish's navigational mistake made me shy and sorrowful, while the excitement of actively capturing a great dorado made me sanguinary and self-assured. But in point of fact the explanation lies elsewhere. It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing. — Yann Martel

I think I'm a shy, self-conscious person who thinks he's being looked at and tries to look okay. Not in a hottie, narcissistic way necessarily. — Mark Leyner

I am a very shy person who is just close to himself. So I would refrain from talking about my personal life. — N. T. Rama Rao Jr.

Fear pounds on the door to our heart demanding to be let in. Joy is modest and often comes into our lives like a shy person entering a room; it can take a while to even notice it's there. — Jonathan Carroll

I always had an inferiority complex, like I wasn't good enough. I was shy. But dancing gave me so much joy, and I was good at it. I felt like a whole person because I could dance. — Patricia McBride

No one shows love. There's no unity between the artists and the streets. There's none of that in D.C. You're never gonna get love in D.C. If you get love in D.C., then you're a special person. — Shy Glizzy

She pushed the revelation about Dr. Kruger into a side pocket of her mind, to be examined more thoroughly another time. Who would ever have suspected that he was shy? That any grownups were, for that matter, and especially a person as important as a doctor? — Beverly Butler

I am drawn to people that are not going to shy away from the very dark, scary stuff of the human condition and in a lot of cases people need alcohol or drugs to create poetry and poetic pose that can take you so far out there where you are still able to recognize yourself and then to bring you back home where you're not the same person you were when you left. — Anne Lamott

The music is key. It has the power to transport you. I go from being a slightly insecure, shy kind of a person offstage, to this super-confident, motivated, entity onstage. — Neil Diamond

All along - not only since she left, but for a decade before - I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who - because no one thought she was a person - had no one to really talk to. — John Green

I've always been a shy person. — Simon Baker

Some of my biggest influences are people like Steven Wright and Todd Berry. I'm a shy person, and I don't think people who aspire to do comedy think that's an option. — Ron Funches

I'm a very nervous, shy person. — Grimes

Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.
This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I'm actually a really shy person. I just really enjoy being in studio; I don't go out much. — Lykke Li

Honestly, I am a shy person. — Blake Lively

I'm still a shy person. I've learned to put that aside on certain occasions. I have to. It's part of my job. — Alexis Bledel

Yeah whatever," Andrew said impatiently. "He came back to the room that night and kept talking about this girl he'd seen at the stargazing. He was shy, and so I told him if he pointed you out, I'd try to finagle a meeting." I swear, Andrew's the only person in the world who could use a word like finagle with a straight face. "But he was talking about me," I said. Andrew shrugged. "When we figured it out, we had a good laugh about it," he said defensively. "But of course you were my girlfriend. So that was that. — Alicia Thompson

I'm a very shy person towards my intimacy and private life. — Charlotte Gainsbourg

How-how do you do?" I asked. My heart was pounding. Blood boiled in my ears.
"It is not possible to make a mistake," she assured me.
I did not know this was a customary greeting given by all Bokonists when meeting a shy person. So, I responded with a feverish discussion of whether it was possible to make a mistake or not.
"My God, you have no idea how many mistakes I've already made. You're looking at the world's champion mistakemaker. — Kurt Vonnegut

I am basically a shy person, so performing sometimes helps me focus - having all those people concentrate their attention on you. I don't see it so much as becoming another person onstage; it's more exploring a different side of your personality. — Kim Gordon

I was a fairly shy person - not the hand raising type. — John Green

That's what being shy feels like. Like my skin is too thin, the light too bright. Like the best place I could possibly be is in a tunnel far under the cool, dark earth. Someone asks me a question and I stare at them, empty-faced, my brain jammed up with how hard I'm trying to find something interesting to say. And in the end, all I can do is nod or shrug, because the light of their eyes looking at me, waiting for me, is just too much to take. And then it's over and there's one more person in the world who thinks I'm a complete and total waste of space.
The worst thing is the stupid hopefulness. Every new party, every new bunch of people, and I start thinking that maybe this is my chance. That I'm going to be normal this time. A new leaf. A fresh start. But then I find myself at the party, thinking, Oh, yeah. This again.
So I stand on the edge of things, crossing my fingers, praying nobody will try to look me in the eye. And the good thing is, they usually don't. — Carol Rifka Brunt

I'm not a very shy person. I'm just somebody who's got a lot of work and who doesn't like to parade himself in new celebrity contexts. — Alan Moore

She loved all the creatures of the farm. Each one, even a hen, was like a person to her, even more real than many of the real people she knew. Some were playful or bold, and some were shy. Some were gentle, and some were wicked. Some were smart, like Fido, and some were foolish, like the hens. — Roger Lea MacBride

As a young person, and I know it's hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn't do normally if I was just by myself. — Annie Leibovitz

I was 26 when I went to my first acting class. I'm naturally quite shy. I'm a quite private person. There's this really strange acting class in New York called Black Nexxus. For someone who's slightly shy or self-conscious, it's the most frightening thing you can do. — Hannah Ware

One of the best things about life is friends. We all agree on that. And yet our shyness with strangers often prevents friendship from ever gaining a foothold. If only we would realize that the other person is probably just as shy as we are and is simply waiting - and hoping - for us to make the first move. — Jerry Spinelli

I am quite a shy person. You say that to people, and they say, 'You do interviews, speeches. How can you be shy?' But, fundamentally, I am. — Nicola Sturgeon