Best 95 quotes in «dagny taggart quotes» category

He held her, pressing the length of his body against hers with a tense, purposeful insistence, his hand moving over her breasts as if he were learning a proprietor’s intimacy with her body, a shocking intimacy that needed no consent from her, no permission. She tried to pull herself away, but she only leaned back against his arms long enough to see his face and his smile, the smile that told her she had given him permission long ago. She thought that she must escape; instead, it was she who pulled his head down to find his mouth again.

Her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high-heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car...

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.

Her plain gray suit was like a thin coating of metal over a slender body against the spread of sun-flooded space and sky. Her posture had the lightness and unselfconscious precision of an arrogantly pure self-confidence. She was watching the work, her glance intent and purposeful, the glance of competence enjoying its own function. She looked as if this were her place, her moment and her world, she looked as if enjoyment were her natural state, her face was the living form of an active, living intelligence...

He led her to the bedroom, he took off her clothes, without a word, in the manner of an owner undressing a person whose consent is not required. He clasped the pendant on her shoulders. She stood naked, the stone between her breasts, like a sparkling drop of blood.

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...

Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility...

He said it without greeting, as if they had parted the day before. Because it took her a moment to regain the art of breathing, she realized for the first time how much that voice meant to her.

He said, looking down at her body, “Dagny, what a magnificent waste!” She had to turn and escape. She felt herself blushing, for the first time in years: blushing because she knew suddenly that the sentence named what she had felt all evening.

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.

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.

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.

He was searching for words to name his meaning without naming it, she thought, to make her understand that which he did not want to be understood.

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.

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.

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....

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 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 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.

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 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.

...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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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

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 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.