"I often think that he's the only one of us who has achieved immortality. I don't mean in the sense of fame and I don't mean that he won't die some day. But he's living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they're not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict - and they call it growth. At the end, there's nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard - one can imagine him existing forever."
Two characters from "The Fountainhead" discussing another character - Howard - who remains fiercely committed to his own soul, his own unique identity, no matter the consequence, no matter the situation, no matter the social recrimination.
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