He had the same look on his face that I had every day when I looked in the mirror. He was nothing more than a shell of a person.

A thorough inspection of someone you believed to be loveable will send you back into your shell if all you saw in their life was all bullshit.

Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?

The more I change my old habits of thinking as that little boy with the shell, the easier it is for me to truly be the person I’ve chosen to be.

It's strange. How hollow I feel. Like there might be echoes inside of me. Like I'm one of those chocolate rabbits they used to sell around Easter, the ones that were nothing more than a sweet shell encapsulating a world of nothing. I'm like that. I encapsulate a world of nothing.

It is very difficult to convince a person to come out of his conversative shell, unless he doesn't feel discomfort there.

You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it'll become too small.'Then what?' I ask.'Well, then you'll have to find a larger shell to live in.'I consider this for a moment. 'What if it's too small but you still want to live there?'She sighs. 'Gracious, child, what a question. I suppose you'll either have to be brave and find a new home or you'll have to live inside a broken shell.

Our bodies are simply our shells, the package for the spirit and the soul.

Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile.

A creature that hides and “withdraws into its shell,” is preparing a “way out.” This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. If we remain at the heart of the image under consideration, we have the impression that, by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being.