Dagny Taggart Quotes

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“They said you were hard and cold and unfeeling.”
“But it’s true...I am, in the sense they mean—only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?"
"What did they mean about you?”
“Whenever anyone accuses some person of being ‘unfeeling,’ he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .‘to feel’ is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Whenever anyone accuses some person of being ‘unfeeling,’ he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .‘to feel’ is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“You—she thought—whoever you are, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon, you whose presence I had always felt in the streets of the city and whose world I had wanted to build, it is my love for you that had kept me moving, my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you face to face. Now I know that I shall never find you—that it is not to be reached or lived—but what is left of my life is still yours, and I will go on in your name, even though it is a name I’ll never learn, I will go on serving you, even though I’m never to win, I will go on, to be worthy of you on the day when I would have met you, even though I won’t.… She had never accepted hopelessness, but she stood at the window and, addressed to the shape of a fogbound city, it was her self-dedication to unrequited love.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“There was an air of luxury about the room, but it was the luxury of expert simplicity.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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..”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“...she had always looked for sparks of competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“It seemed natural; natural to the moment’s peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“She sat beside him in the car, feeling no desire to speak, knowing that neither of them could conceal the meaning of their silence.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“There was so calm, so natural, so total a certainty in the sound of her voice that the mere sound seemed to carry an immense persuasiveness.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“This was men’s moral code in the outer world, a code that told them to act on the premise of one another’s weakness, deceit and stupidity, and this was the pattern of their lives, this struggle through a fog of the pretended and unacknowledged, this belief that facts are not solid or final, this state where, denying any form to reality, men stumble through life, unreal and unformed, and die having never been born.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“...and the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“She had caught the sound of suffering in the faintest exaggeration of evenness in his voice.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“No battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“They seemed to want her approval, without having to know whether she approved or not.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“...a tall, fragile woman with pale blond hair and a face of such beauty that it seemed veiled by distance, as if the artist had been merely able to suggest it, not to make it quite real...she was Kay Ludlow, the movie star who, once seen, could never be forgotten; the star who had retired and vanished five years ago, to be replaced by girls of indistinguishable names and interchangeable faces...she felt that the glass cafeteria was a cleaner use for Kay Ludlow’s beauty than a role in a picture glorifying the commonplace for possessing no glory.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged