I am currently reading Atlas Shrugged, what some would call [[wp:Ayn Rand]]’s greatest work. There is a lot you’ll be hearing about this book in the future from me… but this one I just wanted to put out there now.
“Her eyes were half-closed in the mocking , conscious triumph of being admired, but her mouth was half-open in helpless, begging expectation. He stood across the room, looking at her, at her flat stomach drawn in, as her breath was drawn, at the sensitive body of a sensitive consciousness. He said, his voice low, intent and oddly quiet:
“Dagny, if some artist painted you as you are now, men would come to look at the painting to experience a moment that nothing could give them in their own lives. They would call it great art. They would not know the nature of what they felt, but the painting would show them everything – even that you’re not some classical Venus, but the Vice-President of a railroad, because that’s part of it – even what I am, because that’s part of it, too. Dagny, they’d feel it and go away and sleep with the first barmaid in sight – and they’d never try to reach what they had felt. I wouldn’t want to seek it from a painting. I’d want it real. I’d take no pride in any hopeless longing. I wouldn’t hold a stillborn aspiration. I’d want to have it, to make it, to live it. Do you understand?” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Some references