Dagny Quotes & Sayings

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

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

In an age of casual, cynical, indifferent routine, among people who held themselves as if they were not flesh, but meat-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. And this-thought Mrs. Taggart, smiling-was the girl she had believed to be devoid of sexual capacity. She felt an immense relief, and a touch of amusement at the thought that a discovery of this kind should make her feel relieved. The relief lasted only for a few hours. At the end of the evening, she saw Dagny in a corner of the ballroom, sitting on a balustrade as if it were a fence rail, her legs dangling under the chiffon skirt as if she were dressed in slacks. She was talking to a couple of helpless young men, her face contemptuously empty. — Ayn Rand

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

There were no traces of human existence around them. Old ruts, overgrown with grass, made human presence seem more distant, adding the distance of years to the distance of miles. A haze of twilight remained over the ground, but in the breaks between the tree trunks there were leaves that hung in patches of shining green and seemed to light the forest. The leaves hung still. They walked, alone to move through a motionless world. She noticed suddenly that they had not said a word for a long time. — Ayn Rand

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

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

There was an air of luxury about the room, but it was the luxury of expert simplicity. — Ayn Rand

She had always looked for sparks of competence, like a diamond prospector in an unpromising wasteland. — Ayn Rand

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

He held her, pressing the length of his body against hers with a tense, purposeful insistence, his hand moving over her breasts as if he were learning a proprietor's intimacy with her body, a shocking intimacy that needed no consent from her, no permission. She tried to pull herself away, but she only leaned back against his arms long enough to see his face and his smile, the smile that told her she had given him permission long ago. She thought that she must escape; instead, it was she who pulled his head down to find his mouth again. — Ayn Rand

Every day is a fresh start; don't measure yourself by yesterday's troubles. — Dagny Scott Barrios

Her plain gray suit was like a thin coating of metal over a slender body against the spread of sun-flooded space and sky. Her posture had the lightness and unselfconscious precision of an arrogantly pure self-confidence. She was watching the work, her glance intent and purposeful, the glance of competence enjoying its own function. She looked as if this were her place, her moment and her world, she looked as if enjoyment were her natural state, her face was the living form of an active, living intelligence ... — Ayn Rand

Every run is a work of art, a drawing on each day's canvas. Some runs are shouts and some runs are whispers. Some runs are eulogies and others celebrations. When you're angry, a run can be a sharp slap in the face. When happy, a run is your song. And when your running progresses enough to become the chrysalis through which your life is viewed, motivation is almost beside the point. Rather, it's running that motivates you for everything else the day holds. — Dagny Scott Barrios

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

Dagny leaned back in her chair. The short sentence was a shock. It was not merely relief: it was the sudden realization that nothing else was necessary to guarantee that it would be done; she needed no proofs, no questions, no explanations; a complex problem could rest safely on three syllables pronounced by a man who knew what he was saying. — Ayn Rand

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

I'm not asking you to do your best. I'm asking you to do your job. -Dagny Taggart — Ayn Rand

She knew the general doctrine on sex, held by people in one form or another, the doctrine that sex was an ugly weakness of man's lower nature, to be condoned regretfully. She experienced an emotion of chastity that made her shrink, not from the desires of her body, but from any contact with the minds who held this doctrine. — Ayn Rand

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

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

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

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

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

Do it first and feel about it afterwards.' - Dagny Taggart — Ayn Rand

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

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

She was suddenly as intently conscious of that particular moment, of herself and her own movement. She noticed her gray linen skirt, the rolled sleeve of her gray blouse and her naked arm reaching down for the paper. She felt her heart stop causelessly in the kind of gasp one feels in moments of anticipation. — Ayn Rand

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

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

No battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter. — Ayn Rand

She had always been ... the motive power of her own happiness. — Ayn Rand

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

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

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

They said you were hard and cold and unfeeling."
"But it's true...I am, in the sense they mean - only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?"
"What did they mean about you?"
"Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality. — Ayn Rand

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

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

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

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

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

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

The desperate violence of the way he held her, the hurting pressure of his mouth on hers, the exultant surrender of his body to the touch of hers, were not the form of a moment's pleasure - she knew that no physical hunger could bring a man to this - she knew that it was the statement she had never heard from him, the greatest confession of love a man could make. — Ayn Rand

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

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

A tall, fragile woman with pale blond hair and a face of such beauty that it seemed veiled by distance, as if the artist had been merely able to suggest it, not to make it quite real ... she was Kay Ludlow, the movie star who, once seen, could never be forgotten; the star who had retired and vanished five years ago, to be replaced by girls of indistinguishable names and interchangeable faces ... she felt that the glass cafeteria was a cleaner use for Kay Ludlow's beauty than a role in a picture glorifying the commonplace for possessing no glory. — Ayn Rand

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

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

HIORDIS. Better no child, than one born in shame. DAGNY. In shame? HIORDIS. Dost thou forgot thy father's saying? Egil is the son of a leman; that was his word. DAGNY. A word spoken in wrath - why wilt thou heed it? HIORDIS. Nay, nay, Ornulf was right; Egil is weak; one can see he is no freeborn child. — Henrik Ibsen

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

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

Dagny, there's nothing of any importance in life - except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean. — Ayn Rand

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

This was men's moral code in the outer world, a code that told them to act on the premise of one another's weakness, deceit and stupidity, and this was the pattern of their lives, this struggle through a fog of the pretended and unacknowledged, this belief that facts are not solid or final, this state where, denying any form to reality, men stumble through life, unreal and unformed, and die having never been born. — Ayn Rand

If I happened to find a diamond one day, I would call it Dagny, because the very sound of your name thrills me. I only wish that I could forever hear your name, hear it spoken by all men and beasts, by every mountain and every star. I wish I were deaf to every sound except your name ringing in my ears day and night for the rest of my life. — Knut Hamsun

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

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

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

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

She thought suddenly that she was wrong about his lack of emotion: the hidden undertone of his manner was enjoyment. She realized that she had always felt a sense of light-hearted relaxation in his presence and known that he shared it. He was the only man she knew to whom she could speak without strain or effort. This, she thought, was a mind she respected, an adversary worth matching. — Ayn Rand

Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.
Dagny Taggart — Ayn Rand

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

The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?"
"Darling, what do you mean?"
"There wasn't a person there who enjoyed it," she said, her voice lifeless, "or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant."
"Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay."
"How? By being stupid? — Ayn Rand

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

She did not listen to the voices of the men behind her. She did not know for how long the broken snatches of their struggle kept rolling past her - the sounds that nudged and prodded one another, trying to edge back and leave someone pushed forward - a struggle, not to assert one's own will, but to squeeze an assertion from some unwilling victim - a battle in which the decision was to be pronounced, not by the winner, but by the loser. — Ayn Rand

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

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

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

Aren't you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?"
"That's the only sort of men I like to hire. Dagny, have you lived too long among the looters? Have you come to think that one man's ability is a threat to another?"
"Oh no! But I thought I was almost the only one left who didn't think that. — Ayn Rand

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

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

She had forgotten every problem, person and event behind her; they had always been clouded in her sight, to be hurried past, to be brushed aside, never final, never quite real. This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope. This was the way she had expected to live - she had wanted to spend no hour and take no action that would mean less than this. — Ayn Rand

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

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

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

She felt a board 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 had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew it existed somewhere, the world that had created trains, bridges, telegraph wires and signal lights winking in the night. She had to wait she thought, and grow up to that world. - Dagny Taggart — Ayn Rand

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

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

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

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

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

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

She lay in bed, naked because her body had become an unfamiliar possession, too precious for the touch of a nightgown, because it gave her pleasure to feel naked and to feel as if the white sheets of her bed were touched by Francisco's body - when she thought that she would not sleep, because she did not want to rest and lose the most wonderful exhaustion she had ever known ... — Ayn Rand

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

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

There's something I want you to know,' said Cherryl, her voice taut and harsh, 'so that there won't be any pretending about it. I'm not going to put on the sweet relative act. I know what you've done to Jim and how you've made him miserable all his life. I'm going to protect him against you. I'll put you in your place. I'm Mrs. Taggart. I'm the woman in this family now.'
'That's quite all right,' said Dagny. 'I'm the man. — Ayn Rand

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

But why?"
"You goddamn fool, do you think I consider their question debatable? — Ayn Rand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think, Dagny, what it is to sit by the window in the eventide and hear the kelpie wailing in the boat-house; to sit waiting and listening for the dead men's ride to Valhal; for their way lies past us here in the north. They are the brave men that fell in fight, the strong women that did not drag out their lives tamely, like thee and me; they sweep through the storm-night on their black horses, with jangling bells! Ha, Dagny! think of riding the last ride on so rare a steed! — Henrik Ibsen

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

This was the great clarity of being beyond emotion, after the reward of having felt everything one could feel. — Ayn Rand

They seemed to want her approval, without having to know whether she approved or not. — Ayn Rand