Best 95 quotes in «dagny taggart quotes» category

If you came here dressed like this in order not to let me notice how lovely you are,” he said, “you miscalculated. You’re lovely. I wish I could tell you what a relief it is to see a face that’s intelligent though a woman’s. But you don’t want to hear it. That’s not what you came here for.

I’m not going to help you pretend—by arguing with you—that the reality you’re talking about is not what it is, that there’s still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn’t.

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.

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.

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....

...it was the security of being first, with full sight and full knowledge of one’s course—not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know.

No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice.

...she dismissed it with the thought that there were many kinds of work which were offensive, yet necessary, such as cleaning sewers; somebody had to do it, and Jim seemed to like it.

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

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

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’s 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.

She liked his face—its lines were tight and firm, it did not have that look of loose muscles evading the responsibility of a shape, which she had learned to expect in people’s faces.

She marveled at the futility of his method: he was acting as if, by naming her opinion in advance, he would make her unable to alter it.

She never knew where he was, in what city or on what continent, the day after she had seen him. He always came to her unexpectedly—and she liked it, because it made him a continuous presence in her life, like the ray of a hidden light that could hit her at any moment.

She noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer.

She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, one leg stretched across to the empty seat before her. The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while.

She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.

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 thought of the world’s code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy—she felt a stab of revulsion against that code..

She thought suddenly that she was wrong about his lack of emotion: the hidden undertone of his manner was enjoyment. She realized that she had always felt a sense of light-hearted relaxation in his presence and known that he shared it. He was the only man she knew to whom she could speak without strain or effort. This, she thought, was a mind she respected, an adversary worth matching.

...she was suddenly as intently conscious of that particular moment, of herself and her own movement. She noticed her gray linen skirt, the rolled sleeve of her gray blouse and her naked arm reaching down for the paper. She felt her heart stop causelessly in the kind of gasp one feels in moments of anticipation.

Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state —indifference, because she could not regard those who reached it, as human any longer.

Isn’t 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.

It is not proper for man’s life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him—man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum.

...it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year.

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.

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.

No battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.

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.

She felt an odd, light-hearted indifference, as if she suddenly wanted nothing but the comfort of surrendering to helplessness.

She felt that his presence seemed more intensely real when she kept her eyes away from him, almost as if the stressed awareness of herself came from him, like the sunlight from the water.

She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her...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 always avoided personal reactions, but she was forced to break her rule when she saw the expression on his face. She burst out laughing.

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 heard the words; she understood the meaning; she was unable to make it real—to grant the respect of anger, concern, opposition to a nightmare piece of insanity that rested on nothing but people’s willingness to pretend to believe that it was sane.

...she lay in bed, naked because her body had become an unfamiliar possession, too precious for the touch of a nightgown, because it gave her pleasure to feel naked and to feel as if the white sheets of her bed were touched by Francisco’s body—when she thought that she would not sleep, because she did not want to rest and lose the most wonderful exhaustion she had ever known...

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.

She realized that she had always felt a sense of light-hearted relaxation in his presence and known that he shared it. He was the only man she knew to whom she could speak without strain or effort. This, she thought, was a mind she respected, an adversary worth matching.

She sat beside him in the car, feeling no desire to speak, knowing that neither of them could conceal the meaning of their silence.

She sat, bent over, her head on her arms. She did not move, but the strands of hair, hanging down to her knees, trembled in sudden jolts once in a while.

...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.

She stopped for the duration of a glance around her, as if to recapture the place, but there was no recognition of persons in her eyes, the glance merely swept through the room, as if making a swift inventory of physical objects.

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 . . .

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.

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 was looking at his face; it was the face she had known...There was no sign of tragedy, no bitterness, no tension—only the radiant mockery, matured and stressed, the look of dangerously unpredictable amusement, and the great, guiltless serenity of spirit.

She wondered at the joyous, proud comfort to be found in a sense of the finite, in the knowledge that the field of one’s concern lay within the realm of one’s sight.

There were moments when she felt a sudden, violent longing for him, but it was only impatience, not pain.

The hours ahead, like all her nights with him, would be added, she thought, to that savings account of one’s life where moments of time are stored in the pride of having been lived.

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