The Fountainhead

by Ayn Rand

“If you want my advice, Peter,” he said at last, “you’ve made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don’t you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?” “You see, that’s what I admire about you, Howard. You always know.” “Drop the compliments.” “But I mean it. How do you always manage to decide?” “How can you let others decide for you?”

But Toohey is like a testing stone for people. You can learn about them by the way they take him.”

“A house can have integrity, just like a person,” said Roark, “and just as seldom.” “In what way?” “Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it—and for no other reason.

Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience.”

“I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom.” “You call that freedom?” “To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”

He went away, relieved and desolate, cursing himself for the dull, persistent feeling that told him he had missed a chance which would never return; that something was closing in on them both and they had surrendered.

Catherine stood in the middle of the room, after he had left, and wondered why she suddenly felt empty and cold; why she hadn’t known until this moment that she had hoped he would force her to follow him.

There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.