Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

that look of scrupulous attentiveness and open, puzzled wonder.

“Orren is my friend.” He heard no answer. “I resent your attitude. Orren Boyle will deliver that rail just as soon as it’s humanly possible. So long as he can’t deliver it, nobody can blame us.”

“If he had given us time to grow along with him—” “He has no time to waste.”

Does it matter that nobody blames us—when

It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose.

He did not like her tone of authority,

and he could not understand why she assumed it so naturally.

“Lady, I don’t intend to stick my neck out,”

The engineer shrugged. “Who is John Galt?” “He means,” said the fireman, “don’t ask questions nobody can answer.”

“Proceed with caution to the next signal. If it’s in order, proceed to the main track. Then stop at the first open office.”

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

Through the dry phrases of calculations in her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action.

“Call Rearden and cancel it,”

She wondered why he resented the necessity of dealing with Rearden, and why his resentment had such an odd, evasive quality.

When the voice of Mr. Ayers, courteously eager, inquired of what service he could be to her,

She studied him, feeling slightly uneasy. There was no hostility in his face; he looked straight at her, he answered simply, directly; he spoke like one who has nothing to hide, or to show; the face was polite and empty.

“I don’t want it, Miss Taggart,”

The feeling was a sum, and he did not have to count again the parts that had gone to make it.

All he remembered of those jobs was that the men around him had never seemed to know what to do, while he had always known.

He felt that he could forgive anything to anyone, because happiness was the greatest agent of purification.

He told himself that it would be unjust to feel resentment: they were all trying to show their concern for him—and he wished these were not the things they had chosen for concern.

she was looking at him with that injured look which proclaims the long-bearing patience of the defenseless.

If this meant that she missed him, he thought, then it meant affection, and if it meant affection, then he was unjust to experience a heavy, murky feeling which kept him silent lest his voice betray that the feeling was disgust.

a proudly indirect attempt to test his feeling and to confess her own.

if she wanted a place in the home of her successful son, he would not deny it to her.

What did they seek from him?—thought Rearden—what were they after? He had never asked anything of them; it was they who wished to hold him, they who pressed a claim on him—and the claim seemed to have the form of affection, but it was a form which he found harder to endure than any sort of hatred.

they seemed wounded by anything he said, it was not a matter of his words or actions, it was almost . . . almost as if they were wounded by the mere fact of his being.

and he could not understand.

“I haven’t heard any complaints from my customers.”

“They’re my mills, aren’t they?”

It was he who had to make himself learn to understand them, since he had so much to give, since they could never share his sense of joyous, boundless power.

Surely, he thought, the poor fool knows he’s at my mercy, knows he’s opened himself to be hurt, so I don’t have to do it,

He wanted to slap Philip’s face. But an almost unendurable contempt made him close his eyes instead.

His job was that of servant to men’s relaxation and pleasure, but his manner was that of an embittered quack ministering to some guilty disease.

She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her, toward other children and adults alike. 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.

She took positions of responsibility because there was no one else to take them.

Her superiors, who held the authority, seemed afraid to exercise it, they spent their time avoiding decisions, so she told people what to do and they did it.

The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude—a gray spread of cotton that seemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way.

but struggling well.

She had run the Operating Department for the past three years, without title, credit or authority.