Nephtali

“As I walked home, there was the familiar crush of isolation, that bodily loneliness that swept through me every winter. It was as if I'd been injected with something cold and vicious. I could feel it spreading through me, falling heavy in the center of my chest, pooling there. It was bitter and it was devastating and it frightened me.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“All I wanted then was for everything to go on as before, so that I could stay deeply asleep, and be no more than a hole in space, not here or anywhere at all, for as long as possible, preferably forever.”
― Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories

“Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“You can only subject people who have a conscience to anguish . You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin