During the next few days he realised 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 his memory. He must have over-estimated them in the past.

—Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, (London: Vintage, 2002), 160.