Untouchable places

"She survived it. She was able to survive it because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering was a senseless accident, it was not part of life as she saw it. She would not allow pain to become important. She had no name for the kind of resistance she offered, for the emotion from which the resisstance came; but the words that stood as its equivalent in her mind were: It does not count- it is not to be taken seriously. She knew these were the words, even in the moments when there was nothing left within her but screaming and she wished she could lose the faculty of consciousness so that it would not tell her that what could not be true was true. Not to be taken seriously- an immovable certainty within her kept repeating- pain and ugliness are never to be taken seriously."

To know...it does matter

"If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker who, doing some small routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine, does not choose to know how the machine got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unnecessary."

"Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second - rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own -- they have no inkling of the lonliness that comes when you reach the top. The lonliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them.... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors."

keys

"...so locked up...the key is right there...."

how many keys do we ignore, resist, blind ourselves to...and why?