Atlas Shrugged

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 "Wait! Don't go! Henry, don't abandon us! Don't sentence us to perish! Whatever we are, we're human!
We want to live!"
"Why, no—" he started in quiet astonishment and ended in quiet horror, as the thought struck him fully,
"I don't think you do. If you did, you would have known how to value me."
As if in silent proof and answer, Philip's face went slowly into an expression intended as a smile of
amusement, yet holding nothing but fear and malice. "You won't be able to quit and run away," said
Philip. "You can't run away without money."
It seemed to strike its goal; Rearden stopped short, then chuckled, "Thanks, Philip," he said.
"Uh?" Philip gave a nervous jerk of bewilderment.
"So that's the purpose of the attachment order. That's what your friends are afraid of. I knew they were
getting set to spring something on me today. I didn't know that the attachment was their idea of cutting off
escape." He turned incredulously to look at his mother. "And that's why you had to see me today, before
the conference in New York."
"Mother didn't know it!" cried Philip, then caught himself and cried louder, "I don't know what you're
talking about! I haven't said anything! I haven't said it!" His fear now seemed to have some much less
mystic and much more practical quality.
"Don't worry, you poor little louse, I won't tell them that you've told me anything. And if you were
trying—"
He did not finish; he looked at the three faces before him, and a sudden smile ended his sentence, a
smile of weariness, of pity, of incredulous revulsion. He was seeing the final contradiction, the grotesque
absurdity at the end of the irrationalists' game: the men in Washington had hoped to hold him by
prompting these three to try for the role of hostages.
"You think you're so good, don't you?" It was a sudden cry and it came from Lillian; she had leaped to
her feet to bar his exit; her face was distorted, as he had seen it once before, on that morning when she
had learned the name of his mistress. "You're so good! You're so proud of yourself! Well, I have
something to tell you!"
She looked as if she had not believed until this moment that her game was lost. The sight of her face
struck him like a last shred completing a circuit, and in sudden clarity he knew what her game had been
and why she had married him.
If to choose a person as the constant center of one's concern, as the focus of one's view of life, was to
love—he thought—then it was true that she loved him; but if, to him, love was a celebration of one's self
and of existence—then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and
equivalent of love. It was for the best of his virtues that Lillian had chosen him, for his strength, his
confidence, his pride—she had chosen him as one chooses an object of love, as the symbol of man's
living power, but the destruction of that power had been her goal.
He saw them as they had been at their first meeting: he, the man of violent energy and passionate
ambition, the man of achievement, lighted by the flame of his success and flung into the midst of those
pretentious ashes who called themselves an intellectual elite, the burned out remnants of undigested