In Part 3, Chapter 5, of The Fountainhead, Dominique Francon has gone to Clayton, a faded town in Ohio, where architect Howard Roark is working on a department store. She cannot get over the fact that Roark has to work “in some nameless hole of a place” after having built skyscrapers in New York.
“Roark, it’s the quarry again.”
He smiled. “If you wish. Only it isn’t.”
“After the Enright House? After the Cord Building?”
“I don’t think of it that way.”
“How do you think of it?”
“I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.”
The benevolence of that last line is wonderful. All human beings who haven’t betrayed it have a unique, irreplaceable specialness. And some go on to develop it awesomely.
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Related: Ayn Rand’s essay “Man’s Rights” in the Philosophers, Explained series: