Dagny's Quotes

#1. Dagny's bearing seemed almost indecent, because this was the way a woman would have faced a ballroom centuries ago, when the act of displaying one's half-naked body for the admiration of men was an act of daring, when it had meaning, and but one meaning, acknowledged by all as a high adventure.

Ayn Rand

#2. 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

#3. Well, whose opinion did you take?"
"I don't ask for opinions."
"What do you go by?"
"Judgment."
"Well, whose judgment did you take?"
"Mine."
"But whom did you consult about it?"
"Nobody.

Ayn Rand

#4. There was an air of luxury about the room, but it was the luxury of expert simplicity.

Ayn Rand

#5. Dagny heard a cold, implacable voice saying somewhere within her: Remember it - remember it well - it is not often that one can see pure evil - look at it ...

Ayn Rand

#6. She dismissed it with the thought that there were many kinds of work which were offensive, yet necessary, such as cleaning sewers; somebody had to do it, and Jim seemed to like it.

Ayn Rand

#7. He led her to the bedroom, he took off her clothes, without a word, in the manner of an owner undressing a person whose consent is not required. He clasped the pendant on her shoulders. She stood naked, the stone between her breasts, like a sparkling drop of blood.

Ayn Rand

#8. His face gave her nothing in answer: it had that look of respectful severity with which a man stands before the fact that the truth is the truth.

Ayn Rand

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. She had always been ... the motive power of her own happiness.

Ayn Rand

#12. This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel.

Ayn Rand

#13. She liked his face - its lines were tight and firm, it did not have that look of loose muscles evading the responsibility of a shape, which she had learned to expect in people's faces.

Ayn Rand

#14. Don't try it."
"What?"
"To win any battle when I set the terms."
She did not answer. She was struck by what the words made her feel; it was not an emotion, but a physical sensation of pleasure ...

Ayn Rand

#15. I'm not asking you to do your best. I'm asking you to do your job. -Dagny Taggart

Ayn Rand

#16. Helplessness was a strange experience, new to her; she had never found it hard to face things and make decisions; but she was not dealing with things - this was a fog without shapes or definitions, in which something kept forming and shifting before it could be seen ...

Ayn Rand

#17. There were moments when she felt a sudden, violent longing for him, but it was only impatience, not pain.

Ayn Rand

#18. Didn't you enjoy meeting the young men?"
"What men? There wasn't a man there I couldn't squash ten of.

Ayn Rand

#19. He said it without greeting, as if they had parted the day before. Because it took her a moment to regain the art of breathing, she realized for the first time how much that voice meant to her.

Ayn Rand

#20. You have forbidden me to look for you, you may damn me, you may choose to discard me ... but by the right of the fact that I am alive, I must know that you are ... I must see you this once.
- Dagny Taggart

Ayn Rand

#21. They stopped and looked at each other. She knew, only when he did it, that she had known he would. He seized her, she felt her lips in his mouth, felt her arms grasping him in violent answer ...

Ayn Rand

#22. As she looked at him, her dark gray eyes went slowly from astonishment to stillness, then to a strange expression that resembled a look of weariness, except that it seemed to reflect much more than the endurance of this one moment.

Ayn Rand

#23. It was new to feel protected, and to feel that it was right to accept the protection, to surrender - right, because this peculiar sense of safety was ... not the protection of being spared from battle, but of having won it, not a protection granted to her weakness, but to her strength ...

Ayn Rand

#24. 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

#25. They seemed to want her approval, without having to know whether she approved or not.

Ayn Rand

#26. Isn't it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure? he said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin.

Ayn Rand

#27. The vase was a solid, dark green stone carved into plain surfaces; the texture of its smooth curves provoked an irresistible desire to touch it. It seemed startling in that office, incongruous with the sternness of the rest: it was a touch of sensuality.

Ayn Rand

#28. He said, looking down at her body, "Dagny, what a magnificent waste!"
She had to turn and escape. She felt herself blushing, for the first time in years: blushing because she knew suddenly that the sentence named what she had felt all evening.

Ayn Rand

#29. 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

#30. She was looking at his face; it was the face she had known ... There was no sign of tragedy, no bitterness, no tension - only the radiant mockery, matured and stressed, the look of dangerously unpredictable amusement, and the great, guiltless serenity of spirit.

Ayn Rand

#31. Were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man's foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels ...

Ayn Rand

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. She stopped for the duration of a glance around her, as if to recapture the place, but there was no recognition of persons in her eyes, the glance merely swept through the room, as if making a swift inventory of physical objects.

Ayn Rand

#36. 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

#37. Dagny listened to the Fourth Concerto, her head thrown back, her eyes closed. She lay half-stretched across the corner of a couch, her body relaxed and still; but tension stressed the shape of her mouth on her motionless face, a sensual shape drawn in lines of longing.

Ayn Rand

#38. 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

#39. What are you laughing at?"
"It's wonderful."
"What?"
"The way you don't react as everybody else does nowadays.

Ayn Rand

#40. The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it. All that Dagny wanted of life was contained in the desire to hold her head as he did.

Ayn Rand

#41. She lay on her back, looking up at the sky, feeling no desire to move or think or know that there was any time beyond this moment.

Ayn Rand

#42. Her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high-heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car ...

Ayn Rand

#43. It was as if he were a single whole, grasped by her first glance at him, like some irreducible absolute, like an axiom not to be explained any further, as if she knew everything about him by direct perception, and what awaited her now was only the process of identifying her knowledge.

Ayn Rand

#44. She never knew where he was, in what city or on what continent, the day after she had seen him. He always came to her unexpectedly - and she liked it, because it made him a continuous presence in her life, like the ray of a hidden light that could hit her at any moment.

Ayn Rand

#45. She wanted to tell him of the years she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle ...

Ayn Rand

#46. 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

#47. He looked at her with a touch of defiance, as if waiting for an angry answer. But her answer was worse than anger: her face remained expressionless, as if the truth or falsehood of his convictions were of no concern to her any longer.

Ayn Rand

#48. Dagny, why is it that most women would never admit that, but you do?"
"Because they're never sure that they ought to be wanted. I am."
"I do admire self-confidence."
"Self-confidence was only one part of what I said, Hank."
"What's the whole?"
"Confidence of my value - and yours.

Ayn Rand

#49. She sat, bent over, her head on her arms. She did not move, but the strands of hair, hanging down to her knees, trembled in sudden jolts once in a while.

Ayn Rand

#50. 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

#51. It seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year.

Ayn Rand

#52. She felt an odd, light-hearted indifference, as if she suddenly wanted nothing but the comfort of surrendering to helplessness.

Ayn Rand

#53. She had always looked for sparks of competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland.

Ayn Rand

#54. If you came here dressed like this in order not to let me notice how lovely you are," he said, "you miscalculated. You're lovely. I wish I could tell you what a relief it is to see a face that's intelligent though a woman's. But you don't want to hear it. That's not what you came here for.

Ayn Rand

#55. You always play it open, don't you?" he asked.
"I've never noticed you doing otherwise."
"I thought I was the only one who could afford to.

Ayn Rand

#56. This sense of eagerness, of hope and of secret excitement. It was as if normal existence were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, important - and worth doing.

Ayn Rand

#57. No matter what night preceded it, she had never known a morning when she did not feel the rise of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy in her body and a hunger for action in her mind - because this was the beginning of day and it was a day of her life.

Ayn Rand

#58. She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary.

Ayn Rand

#59. It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share.

Ayn Rand

#60. 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

#61. Oh, but I am quite resigned to taking second place in the shadow of my husband. I am humbly aware that the wife of a great man has to be contented with reflected glory - don't you think so Miss Taggart?"
"No," said Dagny, "I don't.

Ayn Rand

#62. She had always avoided personal reactions, but she was forced to break her rule when she saw the expression on his face. She burst out laughing.

Ayn Rand

#63. Dagny," he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, "think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He did not say, 'It seems to me,' and he did not take orders from those who say, 'In my opinion.

Ayn Rand

#64. Dagny and Fransisco d'Anconia?" she said, smiling ruefully, in answer to the curiosity of her friends. "Oh no, it's not a romance. It's an international industrial cartel of some kind.

Ayn Rand

#65. Every day is a fresh start; don't measure yourself by yesterday's troubles.

Dagny Scott Barrios

#66. 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

#67. She felt that his presence seemed more intensely real when she kept her eyes away from him, almost as if the stressed awareness of herself came from him, like the sunlight from the water.

Ayn Rand

#68. No battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.

Ayn Rand

#69. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility ...

Ayn Rand

#70. The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools; an inviolate peace of spirit is not the achievement of a drifter; to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking.

Ayn Rand

#71. Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.
Dagny Taggart

Ayn Rand

#72. She had caught the sound of suffering in the faintest exaggeration of evenness in his voice.

Ayn Rand

#73. But why?"
"You goddamn fool, do you think I consider their question debatable?

Ayn Rand

#74. Dagny, we can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we've made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to make.

Ayn Rand

#75. She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, one leg stretched across to the empty seat before her. The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while.

Ayn Rand

#76. She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and 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. - Dagny Taggart

Ayn Rand

#77. Tension seemed natural to her, not a sign of anxiety, but a sign of enjoyment ...

Ayn Rand

#78. She stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her.

Ayn Rand

#79. She wondered at the joyous, proud comfort to be found in a sense of the finite, in the knowledge that the field of one's concern lay within the realm of one's sight.

Ayn Rand

#80. 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

#81. Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart

Ayn Rand