Reading books was never part of me until sometime back when I picked up. I've been reading quite a lot ever since. I happened to lay my hands on The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and I'm totally fascinated by Howard and Dominique. Every exchange between the characters is so absorbing and the book is unputdownable. It's definitely worth more than just a read.
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Katie, for 6 years, I thought of how I’d ask your forgiveness some day. And now I have the chance, but I won’t ask. It seems beside the point. I know it’s horrible to say that, but that’s how it seems to me. It was the worst thing I ever did in my life, but not because I hurt you. I did hurt you, Katie, and may be more than you know yourself. But that’s not my worst guilt. Katie, I wanted to marry you. It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that’s the sin that can’t be forgiven, that I hadn’t done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there’s no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain and wasted pain. Katie, why is that they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world, to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. As I wanted to marry you. Not as I want to sleep with some woman or get drunk or get my name in the papers. Those things, they’re not even desires. They’re things people do to escape from desires, because it’s such a big responsibility, really to want something.
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Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell man that altruism is the ideal. Man realizes that he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness. Since the supreme ideal is beyond his grasp, he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value. He himself feels obliged to preach what he can’t practice. To preserve one’s integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already? His soul gives up its self-respect. You’ve got him. He’ll obey.Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his capability to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled. We don’t want great men. Don’t deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, and the exceptional.Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect. You’ve destroyed architecture.
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What are you doing about it Howard?
Nothing.
But you must.
There's nothing I can do.
You must learn how to handle people.
I can't.
Why?
I don't know. I was born without some one particular sense.
It's something one acquires.
I have no organ to acquire it with. I don't know whether it is something I lack, or something extra I have that stops me. Besides, I don't like people who have to be handled.
But you can't sit still and do nothing now. You've got to go after commissions.
What can I tell people inorder to get commissions? I can only show my work. If they don't hear that, they won't hear anything I say. I'm nothing to them, but my work, my work is all we have in common. And I have no desire to tell them anything else.
Then what are you going to do? You're not worried?
No. I expected it. I'm waiting.
For what?
My kind of people.
What kind is that?
I don't know. Yes, I do know, but I can't explain it. I've often wished I could. There must be some one common principle to cover it, but I don't know what it is.
Honesty?
Yes...no, only partly. Courage? I don't know. I'm not that vague on other things. But I can tell my people by their faces. By something in their faces. There will be thousands passing by your house and by the gas station. If out of those thousands, one stops and sees it, that's all I need.
Then you do need other people, after all, don't you?
Of course. What are you laughing at?
I've always thought that you were the most anti-social animal I've ever had the pleasure of meeting.
I need people to give me work. I'm not building mausoleums. Do you suppose I should need them in some other way? In a closer, more personal way?
You don't need anyone in a very personal way.
No.
You're not even boasting about it.
Should I?
You can't. You're too arrogant to boast.
Is that what I am?
Don't you know what you are?
No. Not as far as you're seeing me, or anyone else.
That was typical.
What?
That you din't ask me to tell you what you are as I see you. Anybody else would have.
I'm sorry it wasn't indifference. You're one of the few friends I want to keep. I just din't think of asking.
I know you din't. That's the point. You're a self-centred monster. The more monstrous because you're utterly innocent about it.
That's true.
You should show a little concern when you admit that.
Why?
You know, there's a thing that stumps me. You're the coldest man I know. And I can't understand why, knowing that you're actually a fiend in your own quiet way, why I always feel, when I see you, that you are the most life giving person I've ever met.
What do you mean?
I don't know. Just that.
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