Instead of posting a rage-coloured polemic against Rand and her bullshit philosophy I thought I'd focus instead on her stylistics. That might seem fruitless as The Fountainhead is pretty much an essay masquerading as a novel, but being framed as a novel as it is then it demands close reading as any other novel. So here's a list of quotes which, for one reason or anoyher, are (hopefully) self-evidently bad. As in school-kid bad. Anyway, what I've done is compiled a list of quotes that I found particularly grating on first reading. Of course, this is not an exclusive list and I was tempted to just copy and paste the entire novel, but that would be lazy. If there's anything about Rand I noticed whilst reading The Fountainhead, it's that she absolutely cannot write sex scenes. Or dialogue, which in the novel is almost always stilted and unrealistic. It's also fairly cliched, even for a novel 50 years old or whatever. But maybe people actually spoke like that i the 40s or 50s. Rand's writing is also extremely repetitive. I also imagine that any Feminist critique applied to The Fountainhead would absolutely tear it to shreds, but as schools of thought go Feminist Theory is one of my weaker points. Also, there's a definite ginger-discrimination thread running through the novel, Roark being of orange-hair and all.
Speculation end, quotes now:
1.)"All right Peter. I think I know. You don't have to meet him if you don't want to. Just tell me when you want it. You can use me, if you have to. It won't change anything.
When he raised his head, she was laughing softly.
"You've worked too hard, Peter. You're a little unstrung. Suppose I make you some tea?"
"Oh, I'd forgotten all about it, but I've had no dinner today. Had no time."
"Well of all things! Well, how perfectly disgusting! Come on to the kitchen, this minute, I'll see what I can fix up for you!"
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2.)When they lay in bed together it was-as it had to be, as hte nature of the act demanded-an act of violence. It was surrender, made the more complete by the force of their resistance. It was an act of tension, as the greatest things on earth are things of tension. It was tense as electricity, the force fed on resistance...it was tense as water made into power by the restraining violence of a dam. The touch of his skin against hers was not a caress, but a wave of pain, it became pain by being wanted too much...It was an act of clenched teeth and hatred, it was the unendurable, the agony, an act of passion- the word born to mean suffering- it was the moment made of hatred, tension, pain- the moment that broke its own elements, inverted them, triumphed, swept into a denial of all suffering, into its antithesis, into ecstasy.
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3.)"However, that's how it's done. You see, reasons require scales to weigh them. And scales are not made of cotton. And cotton is what the human spirit is made of-you know, the stuff that keeps no shape and offers no resistance and can be twisted forward and backward and into a pretzel. You could tell them why they should hire you so much better than I could. But they won't listen to you and they'll listen to me. Because I'm the middleman. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line-it's a middleman....Such is the psychology of a pretzel."
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4.)She had no consciousness of purpose. There was no consciousness to this journey, only the journey itself, only the motion and the metal sound of motion around her.
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5.)Her dress—the color of water, a pale green-blue...
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This quote, however, is probably the worst passage in the novel for sheer absurdist stupidity:
"I have hurt you today. I'll do it again. I'll come to you whenever I have beaten you - whenever I know that I have hurt you - and I'll let you own me. I want to be owned, not by a lover, but an adversary who will destroy my victory over him, not with honorable blows, but with the touch of his body on mine. That is what I want of you, Roark. That is what I am. You wanted to hear it all. You've heard it. What do you wish to say now?"
"Take your clothes off."
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A better title for the book would've been "Objectivism for Dummies". Something all the quotes I've listed have in common is an absolute refusal to leave anything ambiguous, which gets clunky at times; it feels as if Rand is treating you the reader with open disdain. I can see why twelve publishers rejected it in the first place, and the life of the novel bears a lot of similarities to the fictitious The Gallant Gallstone, the slowburner inserted and scythed down somewhere in the middle of Rand's novel.
Feel free to contribute other awful quotes, a top-list of bad Randian prose is probably something the world needs. Also, this is something I found humorous.
http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/a-list-of-things-worse-than-a-threesome-involving-ayn-rand-43181.html
I'll spoil it all and tell you in advance that the only thing on the list is a two-some with Ayn Rand.
