Purpose

So I'm pretty far behind in typing up my collection of quotes from the books I've been reading. Mostly because I started reading Atlas Shrugged which took about 10 days to finish. I also made note of so many sections of the book that there are far too many to comment on here, so now I'm going through them and will be posting less than just those I thought interesting, and only those that I feel are most interesting. Also I decided that will write an essay for the Atlas Shrugged contest, so I may post some of my ideas on that here. We'll see. But at any rate, I'll probably be reading a bit less when I start writing.


Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

“She never tried to explain why she liked the railroad. Whatever it was that others felt, she knew that this was one emotion for which they had no equivalent and no response. She felt the same emotion in school, in classes of mathematics, the only lessons she liked. She felt the excitement of solving problems, the insolent delight of taking up a challenge and disposing of it without effort, the eagerness to meet another, harder test. She felt, at the same time, a growing respect for the adversary, for a science that was so clean, so strict, so luminously.”


“Francisco, what’s the most depraved type of human being?”
“The man without a purpose.”
…
“Well, I’ve always been unpopular in school and it didn’t bother me, but now I’ve discovered the reason. It’s an impossible kind of reason. They dislike me, not because I do things badly, but because I do them well. They dislike me because I’ve always had the best grades in class.”

“She knew that fear was useless, that he would do what he wished, that the decision was his, that he left nothing possible to her except the thing she wanted most—to submit. She had no conscious realization of his purpose, her vague knowledge of it was wiped out, she had no power to believe it clearly, in this moment, to believe it about herself, she knew only that she was afraid—yet what she felt was as if she were crying to him: Don’t ask me for it—oh, don’t ask me—do it!”

“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…No, not Francisco d’Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired…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 twisted herself in a slow, faint movement, her breasts pressed to the desk; she felt the longing in her muscles, in the nerves of her body.
Is that what you want? Is it as simple as that?—she thought, but knew that it was not simple. There was some unbreakable link between her love for her work and the desire of her body; as if one gave her the right to the other, the right and the meaning; as if one were the completion of the other—and the desire would never be satisfied, except by a being of equal greatness.”