13.2.10

AYN RAND, FOUNTAINHEAD: an incredible book.
The virtue of selfishness is a hard concept to
grasp, but when understood, as I am struggling to,
completely changes...well just about everything...

“It was not a voice, it was a miracle. It unrolled as a velvet banner. It spoke English words, but the resonant clarity of each clarity of each syllable made it sound like a new language spoken for the first time. It was the voice of a giant.”

“There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends…”

“There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent.”

“He had always wondered why the sensations one felt in dreams were so much more intense than anything one could experience in waking reality - why the horror was so total and the ecstasy so complete - and what was that extra quality which could never be recaptured afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture - and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had been just a path through some woods.”

“In his face she saw suffering that was made old, as if it had been part of him for a long time, because it was accepted, and it looked not like a wound, but a scar.”

“A battle is never self-less.”

“And it made her realize that there is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper himself an object of reverence.”

“She thought that relaxation was attractive only in those for whom it was an unnatural state…”

“Your soul has a single basic function-the act of valuing. ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ ‘I wish’ or ‘I do not wish.’ You can’t say ‘Yes’ without saying ‘I.’ there’s no affirmation without thee one who affirms. In this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours.”

“Don’t let anything remain sacred in a man’s soul-and his soul wont be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man.”

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