Atlas Quotes

And after, when we went outside to look at her finished lantern from the road, I said I liked the way her light shone through the face that flickered in the dark. - "Jack O'Lantern," Katrina Vandenberg from Atlas ~ John Green

He had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act. ~ Ayn Rand

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

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

The dilemma for women who love to write may not have so much to do with finding the elusive literary voice, as with being reluctant to use the one that's already lurking inside, just waiting for the chance to speak up. Many of us, especiall,y those from the generations taught to be good, accommodating girls, are afraid of sounding too strong, too loud, too unconventional, or simply too much like the self we're afraid to reveal to the world. Most of us have at least an inkling of what form our writing voice should take, if only we might find the courage to reveal it. ~ Nava Atlas

What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds. ~ David Mitchell

There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable - except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. ~ Ayn Rand

'Atlas Shrugged,' let's face it, was probably the most important novel of the 20th century that was never a film. ~ Albert S. Ruddy

Above and behind it, slopes scraped north, where the teeth of the Atlas Mountains bit off the sky. Before and below, the earth rolled down a slope of scree and scrub toward the distant Sahara. It was a bleak vista, so still that is seemed the twitch of a scorpion's tail for miles around should draw the eye. ~ Laini Taylor

I got interested in astronomy at the age of 8 because I was looking at an atlas of the planets in my parents' apartment in Arlington, where I grew up. I got a telescope at age 10, which is pretty normal, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I had already seen a lot of cheesy sci-fi films. ~ Seth Shostak

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

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

John, the self-made man, self-made in every sense, out of nowhere, penniless, parentless, tie-less ... but I've always thought of him as if he had come into the world like Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, who sprang forth from Jupiter's head, fully grown and fully armed. ~ 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 was one of those odd thoughts that came out of the blue and struck me as both clever and logical. Hot chocolate wouldn't be something desert people would naturally gravitate toward. (There are cold deserts, of course, but with two suns I always assumed Tatooine is mostly pretty warm. Now, of course, the Star Wars Essential Atlas and other official material backs up that assumption.) I also caught way more grief for this than I ever expected. Quite a few people took me to task for putting an Earth-based drink into the Star Wars universe. Of course, those same people apparently weren't bothered by the Millennium Falcon, or lightsabers. It was, though, a reminder that you never know what word or image might jolt someone out of their suspension of disbelief. Anyway, why would anyone want to live in that Galaxy Far, Far Away if they don't have chocolate? Inconceivable ... ~ Timothy Zahn

I can only drive slowly."
"That's all right."
"And I can only do left turns."
Rose ran downstairs, grabbed a road atlas, and ran triumphantly back up again. "Wales is left! Look! It's left all the way! ~ Hilary McKay

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

I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. ~ Clarence Thomas

Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money? ~ Ayn Rand

Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. ~ David Mitchell

The only thing that counts in life is solid, material assets. It's no time for theories when everything is falling to pieces around us. ~ 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

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. ~ Ayn Rand

As we plotted Zeke and Sue's course, we utilized an atlas. But, if you tried to recreate the trip, it would drive you crazy since we changed the names of not only the highways, but also most of the towns. ~ Wodke Hawkinson

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

Few things are more enjoyable than lingering over the atlas and plotting a trip. ~ J. Maarten Troost

The action of naming an issue instead of evading it, was so unlike the usual behavior of all the men he knew, it was such a sudden, startling relief ... ~ Ayn Rand

Their terror had the evasive quality of guilt: it was not the fear that comes from understanding, but from the refusal to understand. ~ Ayn Rand

He was all the things I'd originally disliked about Zoë, with none of the good I'd come to appreciate. ~ Rick Riordan

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

I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. ~ Ayn Rand

I would read the atlas for pleasure. I knew it was weird. It was weird. ~ Ken Jennings

What books didn't influence me? If only someone would ask that! I've been waiting for years to answer it. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, I will say, had absolutely no influence on me except to cause hours of incredulous boredom. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

15 minutes a day! Give me just this and I'll prove I can make you a new man. ~ Charles Atlas

Lily, Atlas says just keep swimming. - Ellen DeGeneres ~ Colleen Hoover

Israel's rebirth as a nation after two thousand years is a freak phenomenon of history. But in all the branches of science the observation of freak phenomena yields important clues to general laws. Dwarf stars and human giants, radioactivity and parthenogenesis, prophets, maniacs and saints are all freaks which carry the conditions of normality to a pointed and profiled extreme. So does this race of eternal victims with its flayed skin and exposed nerves, which demonstrates, with the horrible precision of an anatomic atlas, a condition of man otherwise mercifully hidden from us. ~ Arthur Koestler

We speak of searching for happiness, of finding contentment, as if these were locations on an atlas, actual places that we could visit if only we had the proper map and the right navigational skills. ~ Melody Warnick

Sorry, that's unfair. Let me warn you. I want you to follow, because no matter what you think you might know, we will always be one step, three steps- seven steps ahead of you, and just when you think you're catching up, that's when we'll be right behind you. And at no time will you be anywhere other than exactly where I want you to be because the closer you think you are, the less you'll actually see. ~ J Daniel Atlas

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted. ~ Franz Kafka

I'll prove in only seven days that I can make you a new man. ~ Charles Atlas

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

All work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes - which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification -which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before. ~ Ayn Rand

Do not fret if you have yet to find it, this lucid
and dreamlike love they speak of, this fervent
and inspiring tenderness. Do not fret if you have
yet to find it, rather, open your heart to an atlas
and stretch your fingertips towards the sky – for
the world is also capable of holding your hand,
and my god, is it ever beautiful, the kind of love
you find tucked away within yourself when the
Earth opens your eyes. ~ Bianca Sparacino

To fear to face an issue to believe that the worst is true.
Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand

It came as a surprise to us, as I suspect it does to many, that marriage changed us. We'd felt as though we'd always had those rings, wrapped about our fingers, like the scraggly garlands of those first, revelatory conversations. But those real rings, wooden as they were, began to set their roots, and that settling, the calming feeling of having been planted into the same plot to flourish, was a relief from that once-nagging question of loneliness. No matter what happened now, even if we'd found ourselves lonelier than we'd ever been, we'd know that that plot of land was our own to cultivate. Each moment was now a dual-moment, each of our lives a dual-life. The open road, that atlas, the open-faced moon and that wine were the first conscious recognitions of our floating life. One that perhaps we'd have created on our own, but now no longer had to. ~ Megan Rich

A stream cut across the grass, and tree branches flowed low to the ground, like a curtain of green fluid. The sound of the water stressed the silence. The distant cut of open sky made the place seem more hidden. Far above, on the crest of a hill, one tree caught the first rays of sunlight. ~ Ayn Rand

It is not Atlas who carries the world on his shoulders, but woman; and sometimes she plays with it as with a ball. ~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

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

Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being - not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement - not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason. ~ Ayn Rand

'Cloud Atlas' is for everybody. The main character in the movie is humanity. ~ Lilly Wachowski

We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good. ~ Ayn Rand

I have been in recent years the author of a bestiary and director of some atlas projects; I've written criticism, editorials, reports from a few front lines, letters, a great many political essays ... , more personal stuff, essays for artists' books, and more ... Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Your depression is exhaustion. Like Atlas, you try to carry this world on your own shoulders. This was never my intention. Allow me to carry the world. ~ Julia Cameron

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. ~ Ayn Rand

The anti-mind is the anti-life. ~ Ayn Rand

The source of work? Man's mind ... man's reasoning mind. ~ Ayn Rand

One young woman's tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver's hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. "The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish", she wrote. "Did you choose the color? Did you think that I would see it? I wanted to tell you about the inside of your hands. I want you to know you are always there when I see patients. When I palpate an abdomen, yours are the organs I imagine. When I listen to a heart, I recall holding your heart. ~ Mary Roach

They kept their secret from the knowledge of others, not as a shameful guilt, but as a thing that was immaculately theirs, beyond anyone's right of debate or appraisal. ~ Ayn Rand

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice - and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man - by choice; he has to hold his life as a value - by choice; he has to learn to sustain it - by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues - by choice.
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality. ~ Ayn Rand

To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. ~ Ayn Rand

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."
I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.
Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to. ~ David Mitchell

It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I'd already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you. ~ Richard Powers

What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish. ~ Ayn Rand

What do you suppose those women are after but the same thing as the chaser - the desire to gain their own value from the number and fame of the men they conquer? Only it's one step phonier, because the value they seek is not even in the actual fact, but in the impression on and the envy of other women. ~ Ayn Rand

Step by step and the thing is done. ~ Charles Atlas

In retrospect I am beginning to think of him as an Atlas who lacked muscle tone but who God damn well decided he was going to hold up the world anyway. ~ Thomas Kunkel

They want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us. ~ 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

ArcGIS includes a Living Atlas of the World. It's like a large living library of geographic information. ~ Jack Dangermond

You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgement and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been calle anti social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. ~ Ayn Rand

They scattered with no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to hold them. If music was emotion and emotion came from thought, then this was the scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helpless, of man's self-abdication. ~ Ayn Rand

I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child's brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he's unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. ~ Ayn Rand

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. (John Galt) ~ Ayn Rand

The evaluation of an action as 'practical,' depends on what it is that one wishes to practice. ~ Ayn Rand

Here, we trade achievements, not failures - values, not needs. We're free of one another, yet we all grow together. ~ 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

the proper mission of librarians: "to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. ~ The Atlas Of New Librarianship

You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty. ~ 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

The justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil. ~ Ayn Rand

I guess it could be worse. My name could be Tlaquepaque, or Irkutsk, or Pyongyang. Or, you know, Pittsburgh. Sometimes I flip through the atlas just to remind myself of all the names that would be worse than mine. ~ Tamara Summers

But this graveyard of dead books doesn't unnerve me. It reminds me that I had a deeper motive, one that only the approach of old age and death has unlocked. I wrote to answer questions I had - the motive of all art, whatever its ostensible subject. There were things I urgently needed to know. ~ James Atlas

A veritable atlas. What rivers of desire, what mountains of ambition. Want, want, hope, hope, this is what your palm say, your palm is nothing but an atlas of impossible longings. ~ Anuradha Roy

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

When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. ~ Ayn Rand

Wondering how one went about forcing one's mind into blankness, particularly after a lifetime lived on the axiom that the constant, clearest, most ruthless function of his rational faculty was his foremost duty. ~ Ayn Rand

Consulting maps can diminish the wanderlust that they awaken,as the act of looking at them can replace the act of travel. But looking at maps is much more than an act of aesthetic replacement. Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits
the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world. ~ Judith Schalansky

The truest success is but the development of self. ~ Charles Atlas

That night we slept apart, all those unexplored continents reemerged on the atlas of your bed. ~ Rosalyn D'Mello

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
[Kung Fu Monkey
Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009] ~ John Rogers

The road was dark, edged with trees. Looking up, he could see a few leaves against the stars; the leaves were twisted and dry, ready to fall. There were distant lights in the windows of houses scattered through the countryside; but the lights made the road seem lonelier.
He never felt loneliness except when he was happy. ~ Ayn Rand

We are beginning to learn that intangibles have more specific gravity than we suspected, that ideas can generate as much forward thrust as Atlas missiles. We may win a victory in exploring the infinities of outer space, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory unless we can also explore the infinities of our inner spirit. We have supersensitive thermographs to show us the slightest variations in skin temperature. No devices can teach us the irrelevance of skin color. WE can transplant a heart from one person to another in a brilliant feat of surgical virtuosity. Now we are ready to try it the hard way: transplanting understanding, compassion, and love from one person to another. ~ Lloyd Alexander

Don't make the mistake of thinking that these three pupils of mine are some sort of superhuman creatures. They're something much greater and more astounding than that: they're normal men - a thing the world has never seen - and their feat is that they managed to survive as such. It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries - to remain human, since the human is the rational. ~ Ayn Rand

From Binet, the idea of measuring imagination with inkblots spread to a string of American intelligence-testing pioneers and educators - Dearborn, Sharp, Whipple, Kirkpatrick. It reached Russia as well, where a psychology professor named Fyodor Rybakov, unaware of the Americans' work, included a series of eight blots in his Atlas of the Experimental-Psychology Study of Personality (1910). It was an American, Guy Montrose Whipple, who called his version an "ink-blot test" in his Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (also 1910) - this is why the Rorschach cards would come to be called "inkblots" when American psychologists took them ~ Damion Searls

Could I have made mistakes? One does not build cities if one is guided by doubt. But can one govern in absolute certainty? I know that my beliefs have elevated me, just as I know that the things I have rejected would have destroyed me. But the city ... it is collapsing before my ... have I become so convinced by my own beliefs that I have stopped seeing the truth? Perhaps. But Atlas is out there, and he aims to destroy me, and destroy my city. To question is to surrender. I will not question. ~ Andrew Ryan

We all perform balancing acts between self and family, individual and community, private desire and group expectation. Gay people in particular must break with the groupthink of church and society in order to live their own lives. (It's why you still see half-read copies of Atlas Shrugged on the night tables of otherwise intelligent gay men.) ~ Christopher Bram

Both of them smiled derisively. But Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted to let nothing remain great. ~ Ayn Rand

He was described as the literary leader of the age, but had never written a book that sold more than three thousand copies. ~ Ayn Rand

But don't I have any freedom of speech?"
"In your own house. Not in mine."
"Don't I have a right to my own ideas?"
"At your own expense. Not at mine."
"Don't you tolerate any differences of opinion?"
"Not when I'm paying the bills. ~ Ayn Rand

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