98 Quotes About Dagny-taggart

They seemed to want her approval, without having to know whether she approved or not.

It was a sudden, stunned state of quiet drunkenness, complete in itself, their hair mingled like the rays of two bodies in space that had achieved their meeting, she saw that he walked with his eyes closed, as if even sight would now be an intrusion.

No matter what night preceded it, she had never known a morning when she did not feel the rise of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy in her body and a hunger for action in her mind—because this was the beginning of day and it was a day of her life.

It was new to feel protected, and to feel that it was right to accept the protection, to surrender - right, because this peculiar sense of safety was...not the protection of being spared from battle, but of having won it, not a protection granted to her weakness, but to her strength....

She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth . . . To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience . . . and the desire would never be satisfied, except by a being of equal greatness.

If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud.

This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel.

Tension seemed natural to her, not a sign of anxiety, but a sign of enjoyment...

She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth . . . To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience . . .