98 Quotes About Dagny-taggart

Helplessness was a strange experience, new to her; she had never found it hard to face things and make decisions; but she was not dealing with things—this was a fog without shapes or definitions, in which something kept forming and shifting before it could be seen...

He looked at her with a touch of defiance, as if waiting for an angry answer. But her answer was worse than anger: her face remained expressionless, as if the truth or falsehood of his convictions were of no concern to her any longer.

She did not listen to the voices of the men behind her. She did not know for how long the broken snatches of their struggle kept rolling past her—the sounds that nudged and prodded one another, trying to edge back and leave someone pushed forward — a struggle, not to assert one’s own will, but to squeeze an assertion from some unwilling victim - a battle in which the decision was to be pronounced, not by the winner, but by the loser.

The desperate violence of the way he held her, the hurting pressure of his mouth on hers, the exultant surrender of his body to the touch of hers, were not the form of a moment’s pleasure—she knew that no physical hunger could bring a man to this—she knew that it was the statement she had never heard from him, the greatest confession of love a man could make.

It was as if he were a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception, and what awaited her now was only the process of identifying her knowledge.

His face gave her nothing in answer: it had that look of respectful severity with which a man stands before the fact that the truth is the truth.

Aren’t you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?”“That’s the only sort of men I like to hire. Dagny, have you lived too long among the looters? Have you come to think that one man’s ability is a threat to another?”“Oh no! But I thought I was almost the only one left who didn’t think that.

She had caught the sound of suffering in the faintest exaggeration of evenness in his voice.

But why?”“You goddamn fool, do you think I consider their question debatable?