A 'Fountainhead' of inspiration.

Not five minutes ago, I finished Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead."

When I got home tonight, I had 30 pages remaining, and it took me almost an hour to read them - a turtle's pace considering how swiftly I strode though this most amazing book.

I just had to read slowly, even going back to read aloud, some of those pages because I didn't want to reach page 694.
I didn't want finish.
I didn't want to have to think about how this book affected me.

I'm still digesting it.
I want to talk to an architect.
I want to have just finished this book in 1943 when it was first published, and not today, when so much is wrong in people.
I want to break free from the mold, from the steel beams that surround me and my mind sometimes.
I want to go to New York City right now, in this slow drizzle, and see it as Wynand saw it, as Roark saw it, as I've always seen it: one of the most beautiful, inspiring places I've ever seen.

Instead, I think.
I flip through the book because I don't want to part with it yet, going back to some of the many passages that moved me.
Not only moved, but changed me. Maybe.

Gail Wynand to Dominique Keating:
"Once you've felt what it means to love as you and I know it - the total passion for the total height - you're incapable of anything less."

Roark during his Cortlandt trial:
"Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unharmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plan his food or hunt it."

From Rand herself:
"Man - every man - is an end in himself, not a means to the end of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life."

and

"I am a Romantic in the sense that I present men as they ought to be. I am Realistic in the sense that I place them here and now and on this earth."

I feel empowered, but not in an annoying feminist bullshit kind of way, sakes alive no.
Just empowered in myself.
And knowing's half the battle right?