Quotes

Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand

“He observed, with satisfactions, that she was silenced by anger.  He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another’s personality, marking vulnerable points.”  P.27

“He never felt loneliness except when he was happy.” P.35

“She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her, toward other children and adults alike.  She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull.  She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew that it existed somewhere . . . She had to wait, she thought, and grow up to that world.” P.55

“The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found challenging; it was ineptitude-a gray spread of cotton that seemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way.  She stood, disarmed, before the riddle of what made this possible.  She could find no answer.” P.56

“She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or an enemy with a mind better than her own.  But the longing passed.  She had a job to do.  She did not have time to feel pain; not often.” P. 56

“She resented the small defeat of being tired, but she knew that she was, tonight.” P.62

“She was incapable of love for any object not of her own choice, and she resented anyone’s demand for it.” P.64

“I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand.  Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips.  I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking.  I wonder what great things have come from such hours.  When a men thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind-and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.” P.65

“’Do they ever think?’ she asked involuntarily, and stopped; the question was her one personal torture and she did not want to discuss it.” P.65

She wanted to rest.  To rest, she thought, and to find enjoyment somewhere.  Her work was all she had or wanted.  But there were times, like tonight, when she felt that sudden, peculiar emptiness, which was not emptiness, but silence, not despair, but immobility, as if nothing within her were destroyed, but everything stood still.  Then she felt the wish to find a moment’s joy outside, the wish to be held as a passive spectator by some work or sight of greatness.  Not to make it, she thought, but to accept; not to begin, but to respond; not create, but to admire.  I need it to let me go on, she thought, because joy is one’s fuel.” P.68

“There was not passion in it, no desire, no actual pleasure, not even a sense of shame.  To them, the act of sex was neither joy nor sin.  It meant nothing.  They had heard that men and women were supposed to sleep together, so they did.” P.73

“Somewhere within her, under the numbness that held her still to receive the lashing, she felt a small point of pain, hot like the pain of scalding.  She wanted to tell him of the years she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle; she wanted to cry to him: I’m not one of them!  But she knew that she could not do it.  . . . she had no right to justify herself now.” P.83

“She had forgotten every problem, person and event behind her; they had always been clouded in her sight, to be hurried past, to be brushed aside, never final, never quite real.  This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope.  This was the way she had expected to live – she had wanted to spend no hour and take no action that would mean less than this.  She looked at him in the exact moment when he turned to look at her.  They stood very close to each other.  She saw, in his eyes, that he felt as she did.  If joy is the aim and the core of existence, she thought, and if that which has the power to give one joy is always guarded as one’s deepest secret, then they had seen each other naked in that moment.” P.88

“Through the years of her childhood, [she] lived in the future – in the world she expected to find, where she would not have to feel contempt or boredom.  But for one month each year, she was free.  For one month, she could live in the present.  When she raced down the hill to meet [him], it was a release from prison.” P.91

“They could not tell whether they owned him or were owned by him completely; it made no difference: either concept made them happy.” P.94

“Forgive me the fear, if I thought I could lose you to them – forgive me the doubt, they’ll never reach you – I’ll never be afraid for you again . . .” p.98

“her last thought was of the times when she had wanted to express, but found no way to do it, an instant’s knowledge of a feeling greater than happiness, the feeling of one’s blessing upon the whole of the earth, the feeling of being in love with the fact that one exists and in this kind of world; she thought that the act she had learned was the way one expressed it.” P. 107

“She knew, even though she was too young to know the reason, that indiscriminate desire, and unselective indulgence were possible only to those who regarded sex and themselves as evil.” P.108

“’Don’t be afraid for me.  It was just this once.  It won’t happen to me again.  It will become much easier . . .later.’” p. 113

“She survived it.  She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering.  She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter.  Suffering was a senseless accident, it was not part of life as she saw it.   She would not allow pain to become important.  She had no name for the kind of resistance she offered, for the emotion from which the resistance came; but the words that stood as its equivalent in her mind were: It does not count – it is not to be taken seriously.  She knew these were the words, even in the moments when there was nothing left within her but screaming and she wished she could lose the faculty of consciousness so that it would not tell her that what could not be true was true.  Not to be taken seriously – an immovable certainty within her kept repeating – pain and ugliness are never to be taken seriously.” P.115

“She knew she had made a mistake by betraying too much intensity.” P117

“an inviolate peace of spirit is not the achievement of a drifter; to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking.” P.119

“She had called him corrupt for years; she had feared it, she had thought about it, she had tried to forget it and never think of it again; but she had never suspected how far the corruption had gone.” P. 123

“she had never known what was meant by blasphemy or what one felt on encountering it; she knew it now.” P.123

“You want it, too, don’t you?”  She was about to answer “No,” but realized that the truth was worse than that.  “Yes,” she answered coldly, “but it doesn’t matter to me that I want it.”  He smiled, in open appreciation, acknowledging the strength she had needed to say it.  p.124

“Man?  What is man?  He’s just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.” P. 129

“The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn’t any.” P. 129