"The Fountainhead". An unexpected, amazing book recommended to me by someone as amazing and unexpected.
Yes, this novel makes a quick cameo in "Dirty Dancing", don' t let that discourage you - what am I saying?! It was a
great movie..."no one puts baby in the corner".

quotes:

...Heyer was dead.
He sat beside the body, his buttocks against his heels, his hands spread on his knees. He looked straight ahead; his glance stopped on the folds of the hangings by the door; he wondered whether the gray sheen was dust or the nap of the velvet and was it velvet and how old-fashioned it was to have hangings by a door. Then he felt himself shaking. He wanted to vomit. He rose, walked across the room and thhrew the door open, because he remembered that there was the rest of the apartment somewhere and a valet in it, and he called, trying to scream for help.


....(G. Wynand) " I love you, Dominique. I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you.Can you understand that?  Only my love - not your answer. Not even your indifference. I've never taken much from the world. I haven't wanted much. I've never really wanted anything. Not in the total, undivided way, not with the kind of desire that becomes an ultimatum, "yes" or "no", and one can't accept the "no" withouth ceasing to exist.  That's what you are to me. But when one reaches that stage, it's not the object that matters, it's the desire. Not you, but I . The ability to desire like  that."

It was not his eyes, not his mouth that she remembered, but his hands...his long fingers continuing the straight lines of the tendons that spread in a fan from his wrist to his knuckles. She thought of him, but the vision present through all her thoughts was the picture of that hand on the granite. It frightened her; she could not understand it.

Dominique awakened each morning to the prospect of a day much significant by the existence of a goal to be reached: the goal of making it a day on which she would not go to the quarry.
She had lost the freedom she loved. She knew that a continuous struggle against the compulsion of a single desire was compulsion also, but it was the form she preferred to accept. It was the only manner in which she could let him motivate her life. She found a dark satisfaction in pain- because that pain came from him.

(Peter Keating) "...-but not because I hurt you. I did hurt you, Katie, and maybe more than you know yourself. But that's not my worst guilt...Katie, I wanted to marry you. It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that's the sin that can't be forgiven - that I hadn't done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there's no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain-and wasted pain...Katie, why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world - to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. As I wanted to marry you. Not as I want to sleep with some woman or get drunk or get my name in the papers. Those things - they're not even desires - they're things people do escape from desires - because it's such a big responsibility, really to want something."


(Howard Roark) "You'd  rather not hear it now? But I want you to hear it. We never need to say anything to each other when we're together. This is - for the time when we won't be together. I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I've given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way you can wish to be loved. This is the only way I can want you to love me. If you married me now, I would become your whole existence. But I would not want you then. You would not want yourself-and so you would not love me long. To say " I love you" one must know first how to say the "I"The kind of surrender I could have from you now would give me nothing but an empty hulk. If I demanded it, I'd destroy you. That's why I won't stop you. I'll let you go to your husband. I don't know how I'll live through the tonight, but I will. I want you whole, as I am,  as you'll remain in the battle you've chosen. A battle is never selfless....You must learn not to be afraid of the world. Not to be held by it as you are now. I must let you learn it. I can't help you. You must find your own way. When you have it, you'll come back to me.  They won't destroy me,  Dominique. And they won't destroy you. You'll win, because you've chosen the hardest way of fighting for your freedom from the world. I'll wait for you. I love you. I'm saying this now for all the years we'll have to wait. I love you, Dominique"
   Then he kissed her and let her go.