All 24 Uses of
pretense
in
Atlas Shrugged
- "Man's metaphysical pretensions," he said, "are preposterous.†
Chpt 1.6
- I don't know how many ends you're all playing against the middle and against one another, or how many pretenses you have to keep up in how many opposite directions.†
Chpt 1.7
- She saw him and said dryly, guiltily, in apology, "I'm sorry, Mr. Rearden," not attempting the futile pretense of hiding her face.†
Chpt 1.7 *
- He wished he had a friend who could be permitted to see him suffer, without pretense or protection, on whom he could lean for a moment, just to say, "I'm very tired," and find a moment's rest.†
Chpt 1.7
- I don't want any pretense about how safe I am.†
Chpt 1.8
- I want no pretense, no evasion, no silent indulgence, with the nature of our actions left unnamed.†
Chpt 1.9
- I want no pretense about love, value, loyalty or respect.†
Chpt 1.9
- She was staring at him, her face naked in bewilderment, with no mystery, no pretense or protection; whatever calculations she had made, this was a thing she had not expected.†
Chpt 1.10
- He wanted to spare her the need of pretense or embarrassment, she thought with gratitude.†
Chpt 2.2
- What pretense are you talking about, Lillian?†
Chpt 2.4
- By the rules of the complicated pretense which all those people played for one another's benefit, they should have considered his stand as incomprehensible folly; there should have been rustles of astonishment and derision; there were none; they sat still; they understood.†
Chpt 2.4
- Well, I gave those bitches what they wanted-but what they literally wanted, without the pretense that they expected, the pretense that hides from Them the nature of their wish.†
Chpt 2.4
- Well, I gave those bitches what they wanted-but what they literally wanted, without the pretense that they expected, the pretense that hides from Them the nature of their wish.†
Chpt 2.4
- I cannot conceive what it is you think you can accomplish by a pretense of this kind, and I will not help you to stage it.†
Chpt 2.5
- By the end of the second year, we dropped the pretense of the 'family meetings'-in the name of 'production efficiency and time economy,' one meeting used to take ten days-and all the petitions of need were simply sent to Miss Starnes' office.†
Chpt 2.10
- …it, have nothing to sacrifice, and those who have, are not willing any longer-when men see that neither their hearts nor their muscles can save them, but the mind they damned is not there to answer then: screams for help-when they collapse as they must, as men without mind-when they have no pretense of authority left, no remnant of law, no trace of morality, no hope, no food and no way to obtain it-when they collapse and the road is clear-then we'll come back to rebuild the world.†
Chpt 3.1
- "Dagny, Dagny, Dagny"-his voice sounded, not as if a confession resisted for years were breaking out, but as if he were repeating the long since known, laughing at the pretense that it had ever been unsaid —"of course I love you.†
Chpt 3.2
- She was seeing the brand of pain and fear on the faces of people, and the look of evasion that refuses to know it-they seemed to be going through the motions of some enormous pretense, acting out a ritual to ward off reality, letting the earth remain unseen and their lives unlived, in dread of something namelessly forbiddenyet the forbidden was the simple act of looking at the nature of their pain and questioning their duty to bear it.†
Chpt 3.3
- She noticed that this form of pretense was as unreal to Mr. Meigs as it was to her, though for an antipodal reason.†
Chpt 3.3
- She knew that behind the clattering, lumbering pretense of their council sessions, committee meetings and mass debates, the decisions were made in advance, in furtive informality, at luncheons, dinners and bars, the graver the issue, the more casual the method of settling it.†
Chpt 3.5
- Who are the victims, condemned to remain unacknowledged and to perish in silence, lest their agony disturb your pretense that they do not exist?†
Chpt 3.7
- Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter-and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it.†
Chpt 3.7
- Existence among you is a giant pretense, an act you all perform for one another, each feeling that he is the only guilty freak, each placing his moral authority in the unknowable known only to others, each faking the reality he feels they expect him to fake, none having the courage to break the vicious circle.†
Chpt 3.7
- The protective walls of emotion, of evasion, of pretense, of semi-thinking and pseudo-words, built up by him through all of his years, had crashed in the span of one moment-the moment when he knew that he wanted Galt to die, knowing fully that his own death would follow.†
Chpt 3.9
Definition:
-
(pretense) a false appearance or action to help one pretendeditor's notes: This is sometimes seen in the expression "false pretense" or "false pretenses" which is just emphasizing that behavior or actions do not reflect the true situation.