Dr Zhivago (1958) 2

"During the next few days he realized how isolated he was. It was no one's fault, he thought. He had simply got what he had asked for.

His friends had become strangely dim and colourless. Not one of them had kept his own outlook, his own world. They had been much more vivid in this memory. He must have over-estimated them in the past.

It had been easy to do so, as long as the order of things had been such that people with means could indulge their follies and eccentricities at the expense of the poor. The fooling, the right to idleness enjoyed by the few while the majority suffered, could itself create an illusion of genuine character and originality." --- Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago (1958), p. 174