Top 100 Sherry Turkle Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “I said that we use digital “passbacks” to placate young children who say they are bored. We are not teaching them that boredom can be recognized as your imagination calling you. Of.”

— Sherry Turkle

53. “People thought I was very pro-computer. I was on the cover of Wired magazine. Then things began to change. In the early 80s, we met this technology and became smitten like young lovers. But today our attachment is unhealthy.”

— Sherry Turkle

54. “These days, students struggle with conversation. What makes sense is to engage them in it. The more you think about educational technology, with all its bells and whistles, the more you circle back to the simple power of conversation.”

— Sherry Turkle

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

— Sherry Turkle

56. “Whenever one has time to write, edit, and delete, there is room for performance.”

— Sherry Turkle

57. “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.”

— Sherry Turkle

58. “Sometimes a citizenry should not simply “be good”. You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent.”

— Sherry Turkle

59. “It used to be that we imagined that our mobile phones would be for us to talk to each other. Now, our mobile phones are there to talk to us.”

— Sherry Turkle

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

— Sherry Turkle

61. “Hold on to your passion – you’ll need it!”

— Sherry Turkle

62. “Rapture is costly; it usually means you are overlooking consequences.”

— Sherry Turkle

63. “Human relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body – not too little, not too much, just right.”

— Sherry Turkle

64. “Overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of our lives, we turn to technology to help us find time. But technology makes us busier than ever and ever more in search of retreat. Gradually, we come to see our online life as life itself.”

— Sherry Turkle

65. “Relationships we complain about nevertheless keep us connected to life.”

— Sherry Turkle

66. “What is so seductive about texting, about keeping that phone on, about that little red light on the BlackBerry, is you want to know who wants you.”

— Sherry Turkle

67. “You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.”

— Sherry Turkle

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

— Sherry Turkle

69. “When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part.”

— Sherry Turkle

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

— Sherry Turkle

71. “The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.”

— Sherry Turkle

72. “I love sharing photographs and websites, I’m for all of these things. I’m for Facebook. But to say that this is sociability? We begin to define things in terms of what technology enables and technology allows.”

— Sherry Turkle

73. “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.”

— Sherry Turkle

74. “Real people, with their unpredictable ways, can seem difficult to contend with after one has spent a stretch in simulation.”

— Sherry Turkle

75. “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

76. “To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.”

— Sherry Turkle

77. “We are not as strong as technology’s pull.”

— Sherry Turkle

78. “Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.”

— Sherry Turkle

79. “My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy – about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude – the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude.”

— Sherry Turkle

80. “We are so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve. And.”

— Sherry Turkle

81. “It is easier to face an emergency than to have those difficult conversations. When we go into crisis mode, we give ourselves permission to defer the kinds of conversations that politics requires. And right now, our politics requires conversations, too long deferred, about being a self and a citizen in the world of big data.”

— Sherry Turkle

82. “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

83. “I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I’m a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day.”

— Sherry Turkle

84. “Children make theories when they are confused or anxious.”

— Sherry Turkle

85. “In 1979 Susan Sontag wrote, “Today, everything exists to end in a photograph.” Today, does everything exist to end online?”

— Sherry Turkle

86. “Anxieties migrate, proliferate.”

— Sherry Turkle

87. “I think few people of education enter politics because it seems like a contact blood sport.”

— Sherry Turkle

88. “It used to be that we imagined our mobile phones were there so that we could talk to each other. Now we want our mobile phones to talk to us.”

— Sherry Turkle

89. “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.”

— Sherry Turkle

90. “Face-to-face with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine.”

— Sherry Turkle

91. “The desire for the edited life crosses generations, but the young consider it their birthright.”

— Sherry Turkle

92. “In solitude we don’t reject the world but have the space to think our thoughts.”

— Sherry Turkle

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

— Sherry Turkle

94. “Instead of thinking about addiction, it makes sense to confront this reality: We are faced with technologies to which we are extremely vulnerable and we don’t always respect that fact. The path forward is to learn more about our vulnerabilities. Then, we can design technology and the environments in which we use them with these insights in mind. For example, since we know that multitasking is seductive but not helpful to learning, it’s up to us to promote “unitasking.”

— Sherry Turkle

95. “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.”

— Sherry Turkle

96. “Over time, we transform a collection of parts into a comprehension of wholes.”

— Sherry Turkle

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

— Sherry Turkle

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

— Sherry Turkle

99. “When you depend on the computer to remember your past, you focused on whatever past is kept on the computer.”

— Sherry Turkle

100. “Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision.”

— Sherry Turkle