Atlas Shrugged Love Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Volume.Chapter.Section.Page). We used the 50th Anniversary Edition published by Signet Books in 2007.

Quote #4

She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth....To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his....A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would give her life to experience. (1.8.2.14)

Dagny's quest is for more than just a "Prince Charming." The man she loves must embody her entire value system. He must be more of a kindred spirit rather than a romantic "soul mate."

Quote #5

"I am thinking of the fifteen years that Sebastián d'Anconia had to wait for the woman he loved: He did not know whether he would ever find her again, whether she would survive...whether she would wait for him.... But when he carried her across the threshold of his house, as the first Señora d'Anconia of a new world, he knew that the battle was won, that they were free, that nothing threatened her and nothing would ever hurt her again." (2.5.1.240)

The epic saga of Francisco's ancestor provides us with significant insight into his motives and hopes. It's important that this story doesn't act as a prophecy; in a book with lots of "living legends," this legacy doesn't come true: Francisco doesn't get the girl.

Quote #6

Such was the code that the world had accepted and such was the key to the code: that it hooked man's love of existence to a circuit of torture, so that only the man who had nothing to offer would have nothing to fear, so that the virtues which made life possible and the values which gave it meaning became its agents of destruction.... (2.6.3.77)

Hank realizes the true evil of the looters' system here – they flip everything around so that desires become sins and joy becomes torture.