“She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each morning.”

“There was still one response, the greatest, that she had missed. 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... No, not Francisco d'Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience.”

“She was twelve years old when she told Eddie Willers that she would run the railroad when they grew up. She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. to hell with that, she thought--and never worried about it again.”

“He, too, stood looking at her for a moment--and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning...”

“She did not know what it was about him that had always made her want to see him broken.”

“She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought- and never worried about it again.”

“Moments later, when she saw the look of control returning to his face, she said, "Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.”