The Fountainhead

“Do you always have to have a purpose? Do you always have to be so damn serious? Can’t you ever do things without reason, just like everyone else? You’re so serious, so old. Everything’s important to you, everything’s great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. Can’t you ever be comfortable- and unimportant?”
“No.”
“Don’t you get tired of the heroic?”
“What’s heroic about me?”
“Nothing. Everything. I don’t know. It’s not what you do. It’s what you make people feel around you.”
“What?”
“The un-normal. The strain. When I’m with you - It’s always like a choice. Between you-and the rest of the world. I don’t want that kind of choice. I don’t want to be an outsider. I want to belong. There’s so much in this world thats simple and pleasant. It’s not all fighting and renunciation. It is- with you.”
‘What have I renounced?”
“Oh you’ll never renounce anything! You’d walk over corpses for what you want. But it’s what you’ve renounced by never wanting it.”
“That’s because you can’t want both.”
“Both what?”
“Look, Peter. I’ve never told you any of those things about me. What makes you see them? I’ve never asked you to make a choice between me and anything else. What makes you feel like there is a choice involved? What makes you uncomfortable when you feel that- since you’re so sure I’m wrong?”
“I…I don’t know.” He added: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And then he asked suddenly:
“Howard, why do you hate me?”
“I don’t hate you.”
“Well that’s it! Why don’t you at least hate me?”
“Why should I?”
“Just to give me something. I know you can’t like me. You can’t like anyone. So it would be kinder to acknowledge people’s existence by hating them.”
“I’m not kind, Peter.”
And as Keating found nothing to say, Roark added:
“Go home, Peter. You got what you wanted. Let it go at that. See you Monday.”

(Ayn Rand)