Monday, January 7, 2008

Great Paragraphs

Consider this the first of a series of blogs I will be posting on great paragraphs I find while reading. Below, the first, and not likely last, from The Fountainhead.

Sometimes, not often, he sat up and did not move for a long time; then he smiled, the slow smile of an executioner watching a via victim. He thought of his days going by, of the buildings he could have been doing, should have been doing and, perhaps, never would be doing again. He watched the pain's unsummoned appearance with a cold, detached curiosity; he said to himself: Well, here it is again. He waited to see how long it would last. It gave him a strange, hard pleasure to watch his fight against it, and he could forget that it was his own suffering: he could smile in contempt, not realizing that he smiled at his own agony. Such moments were rare. But when they came, he felt as he did in the quarry: the he had to drill through granite, that he had to drive a wedge and blast the thing within him which persisted in calling to his pity.


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