Status Updates From We the Living

"COMRADE VICTOR DUNAEV, ONE OF OUR YOUNGEST and most brilliant engineers, has been assigned to a job on the Volkhovstroy, the great hydroelectric project of the Soviet Union. It is a responsible post, never held previously by one of his years."

-Rand, Ayn. We the Living.

“May I come in? They’re after me.”

She pulled him in and closed the door slowly, steadily, taking a long, patient minute. The door touched the jamb without a sound.

-Rand, Ayn. We the Living.

'“No. It’s too late. But before . . . before they get me . . . I still have you, Kira . . . Kira . . . Kira . . . I love you . . . I still have you. . . .” She whispered: “Yes,” pressing his face, white as marble, to the black velvet of her dress.

-Rand, Ayn. We the Living.

'She felt suddenly as if the words of his answer were the links of a chain she would never be able to break: “It’s also possible for every one of us to have to face a death sentence some day. Does it mean that we have to prepare for it?”'

-Rand, Ayn. We the Living.

'AT FIRST THERE WERE WHISPERS. Students gathered in groups in dark corners and jerked their heads nervously at every approaching newcomer, and in their whispers one heard the words: “The Purge.”'

-Rand, Ayn. We the Living.

'AT FIRST THERE WERE WHISPERS. Students gathered in groups in dark corners and jerked their heads nervously at every approaching newcomer, and in their whispers one heard the words: “The Purge.”'

-Rand, Ayn. We the Living.

"A HOUSE COLLAPSED, EARLY ONE afternoon. The front wall crashed, with a shower of bricks, in a white cloud of limey dust."

-Rand, Ayn. We the Living.

"KIRA HAD WAITED IN LINE for three hours to get the bread at the Institute Co-operative. It was dark when she stepped down from the tramway, her loaf pressed tightly under her arm. At distant corners, lanterns made snakes of light wiggle in black puddles."

-Rand, Ayn. We the Living.

"WHEN KIRA AWAKENED, LEO’S HEAD WAS RESTING on her one breast; a sailor was looking at the other."

-Rand, Ayn. We the Living.

“Well, I’m too conceited to want admiration. But if you do want it—who can give it to you? Who is capable of it? Who can still want to be capable? It’s a curse, you know, to be able to look higher than you’re allowed to reach. One’s safer looking down, the farther down the safest—these days.”

-Rand, Ayn. We the Living.

"From her corner on the floor, Kira could see the reddish-gray sky in the window and the gold spire of the Admiralty far away in the cold, foggy dusk over Petrograd, the city where so much was possible."

-Rand, Ayn. We the Living.

“It is not at all a cultured profession for a woman,” said Galina Petrovna.

“It’s the only profession,” said Kira, “for which I don’t have to learn any lies. Steel is steel. Most of the other sciences are someone’s guess, and someone’s wish, and many people’s lies.”

-Rand, Ayn. We the Living.

"PETROGRAD SMELT OF CARBOLIC ACID."

-Rand, Ayn. We the Living.