#ayn

Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected. ↗

— Roman Payne

#cities-and-countries #city #enmity #glory #love

About their wedding on a beach of Nantucket, after nearly 50 years together as a couple: "After years of being who we truly were only in the privacy of our homes or with a few friends, we were out in the world, under the sky, no longer pretending.” - Norman Sunshine, co-author, Double Life ↗

— Norman Sunshine

#double-life #gay-marriage #love-story #norman-sunshine #home

It is growing cold. Winter is putting footsteps in the meadow. What whiteness boasts that sun that comes into this wood! One would say milk-colored maidens are dancing on the petals of orchids. How coldly burns our sun! One would say its rays of light are shards of snow, one imagines the sun lives upon a snow crested peak on this day. One would say she is a woman who wears a gown of winter frost that blinds the eyes. Helplessness has weakened me. Wandering has wearied my legs. ↗

— Roman Payne

#cold #coldness #december #february #forest

I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#ayn-rand #galt #objectivism #philosophy #taggart

I was surrounded by friends, my work was immense, and pleasures were abundant. Life, now, was unfolding before me, constantly and visibly, like the flowers of summer that drop fanlike petals on eternal soil. Overall, I was happiest to be alone; for it was then I was most aware of what I possessed. Free to look out over the rooftops of the city. Happy to be alone in the company of friends, the company of lovers and strangers. Everything, I decided, in this life, was pure pleasure. ↗

— Roman Payne

#alone #aloneness #company #flowers #friends

If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn't you make the most of it? ↗

— Ayn Rand

#life #objectivism #life

May a man live well-enough and long-enough, to leave many joyful widows behind him. ↗

— Roman Payne

#men #pleasure #polygamy #roman-payne #widows

Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft. ↗

— Roman Payne

#life #memories #novel-writing #novelist #payne

Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I’ve no regrets. ↗

— Roman Payne

#carpe-diem #great #learning #life #life-lessons

But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#convictions #life #philosophy #sex #life