Was her reticence about her own affairs as inviolable as it had often been convenient for rather an egoistical young man to think it?
"Night and Day"
Virginia Woolf
And she peevishly blamed them all, thinking that they were not kind to her, and she failed to perceive that what separated her from them all was a lack of spiritual concord, of harmony, of sympathy, because she had nothing that appealed to them and they had nothing that appealed to her, because the emanations from her soul and theirs never reached each other but flowed in two directions, because everything that they understood in one another, even without words, she did not understand, even though it were explained to her in words, because she looked upon them as sick, mad, egoistical and nerve-ridden, because they looked upon her as shallow and vulgar.
"Dr. Adriaan"
Louis Couperus
His elder was provoked enough by his deadness of enthusiasm, and that the boy should dare to stalk on a bare egoistical lover's sentiment to be critical of him, Agostino, struck him as monstrous.
"The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of George Meredith"
George Meredith