Ny > Ny's Quotes

“There's no point in asking why, even though everybody will. I know why. The harder question is "why not?" I can't believe she ran out of answers before I did.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“She was constitutionally unable to endure any man being in love with any woman not herself...”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

“Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.”
― Mark Twain

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“So much good, so much evil. Just add water.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip," Jonathan would say, other times, "is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness...”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“But I don't think of you.

(Howard Roark)”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Self respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don't know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you've felt what it means to love as you and I know it - total passion for the total height - you're incapable of anything less.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each morning.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that’s the impossible, in the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn’t be easy for you.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“There is no affirmation without the one who affirms. in this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Rules?" said Roark. "Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.”
― Ayn Rand , The Fountainhead

“What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it's only a building. It's not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture, and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it."
"Isn't it?”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“I don't believe it matters to me- that they're going to destroy it. Maybe it hurts so much that I don't even know I'm hurt. But I don't think so. If you want to carry it for my sake, don't carry more than I do. I'm not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it's not really pain.

Where does it stop?

Where I can think of nothing and feel nothing except that I designed that temple. I built it. Nothing else can seem very important.

You shouldn't have built it. You shouldn't have delivered it to the sort of thing they're doing.

That doesn't mater. Not even that they'll destroy it. Only that it had existed.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead