dagny-taggart

Dagny leaned back in her chair. The short sentence was a shock. It was not merely relief: it was the sudden realization that nothing else was necessary to guarantee that it would be done; she needed no proofs, no questions, no explanations; a complex problem could rest safely on three syllables pronounced by a man who knew what he was saying.

Isn__ it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?_ he said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin.

We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values.

She knew the general doctrine on sex, held by people in one form or another, the doctrine that sex was an ugly weakness of man__ lower nature, to be condoned regretfully. She experienced an emotion of chastity that made her shrink, not from the desires of her body, but from any contact with the minds who held this doctrine.

It seemed natural; natural to the moment__ peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk.

If that__ the price of getting together, then I__l be damned if I want to live on the same earth with any human beings! If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? Nothing can make self-immolation proper. Nothing can give them the right to turn men into sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can__ be punished for being good. One can__ be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we__ better start slaughtering one another, because there isn__ any right at all in the world!

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.

You always play it open, don__ you?_ he asked.____e never noticed you doing otherwise.___ thought I was the only one who could afford to.

The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools; 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.

Well, whose opinion did you take?___ don__ ask for opinions.___hat do you go by?___udgment.___ell, whose judgment did you take?___ine.___ut whom did you consult about it?___obody.

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...

It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share.

She lay on her back, looking up at the sky, feeling no desire to move or think or know that there was any time beyond this moment.

Are you saying,_ he asked slowly, __hat I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?___f course.___hat__ not the reaction of most people to being wanted.___t isn__.___ost people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.___ feel that others live up to me, if they want me....

She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary.

...she stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her.

As she looked at him, her dark gray eyes went slowly from astonishment to stillness, then to a strange expression that resembled a look of weariness, except that it seemed to reflect much more than the endurance of this one moment.

You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached.