20 uses
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Definition
to gain or reach something with effort
- He was left, not with a sense of attainment, but with a sense of his own degradation.1.6 Part 1 Chapter 6 — The Non-Commercial (92% in)
- The unattainable.1.7 Part 1 Chapter 7 — The Exploiters and the Exploited (71% in)
- She stood, in a room of crumbling plaster, pressed to the windowpane, looking up at the unattainable form of everything she loved.1.8 Part 1 Chapter 8 — The John Galt Line (9% in)
- If I'm asked to name my proudest attainment, I will say: I have slept with Hank Rearden.1.9 Part 1 Chapter 9 — The Sacred and the Profane (9% in)
- Don't you grant any recognition at all to the women who attain unusual heights of conquest, not in the industrial, but in the human realm?2.2 Part 2 Chapter 2 — The Aristocracy of Pull (51% in)
- There were long, silent evenings when the emotion that made her sit still and look at the unattainable distance beyond the fading light to the south, was loneliness for Hank Rearden.2.8 Part 2 Chapter 8 — By Our Love (16% in)
- She thought of what an enormous distance five miles had suddenly become, and that a division point thirty miles away was now unattainable-after an era of railroads built by men who thought in thousands of transcontinental miles.2.10 Part 2 Chapter 10 — The Sign of the Dollar (66% in)
- She had always wondered, in incredulous contempt, about the sects that preached the annihilation of the universe as the ideal to be attained.2.10 Part 2 Chapter 10 — The Sign of the Dollar (67% in)
- When she saw the lights of a town, like a handful of gold coins flung upon the prairie, the brightly violent lights fed by an electric current, they seemed as distant as the stars and now as unattainable.2.10 Part 2 Chapter 10 — The Sign of the Dollar (86% in)
- There is no form of enjoyment that we seek from their world, and-this was hardest for us to attain-what we now feel for their world is that emotion which they preach as an ideal: indifference-the blank-the zero-the mark of death...... We are giving men everything they've professed to want and to seek as virtue for centuries.3.1 Part 3 Chapter 1 — Atlantis (78% in)
- He added, and she was shocked by the sudden gentleness of his voice, "I said that that kind of indifference toward a world which should have been ours was the hardest thing to attain.3.1 Part 3 Chapter 1 — Atlantis (89% in)
- But this-she thought in consternation-was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: the view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve.3.2 Part 3 Chapter 2 — The Utopia of Greed (32% in)
- ...suddenly conscious of her posture: she had let her shoulder blades slide down against the chair, carelessly, half-lying, one leg stretched forward-and with her sternly tailored, transparent blouse, her wide peasant skirt hand-printed in violent colors, her thin stocking and high-heeled pump, she did not look like a railroad executive-the consciousness of it struck her in answer to his eyes that seemed to be seeing the unattainable-she looked like that which she was: his servant girl.3.2 Part 3 Chapter 2 — The Utopia of Greed (39% in)
- Then, not as memory, but as an experience of the present, she felt herself reliving the moment when she had stood at the window of her room in New York, looking at a fogbound city, at the unattainable shape of Atlantis sinking out of reach-and she knew that she was now seeing the answer to that moment.3.2 Part 3 Chapter 2 — The Utopia of Greed (94% in)
- ...not yet to be broken, his voice catching some tone of hers, as if in signal of the same code, a voice with no sign of emotion except in the spacing of the words: "If you fail, as men have failed in their quest for a vision that should have been possible, yet has remained forever beyond their reach-if, like them, you come to think that one's highest values are not to be attained and one's greatest vision is not to be made realdon't damn this earth, as they did. don't damn existence.3.2 Part 3 Chapter 2 — The Utopia of Greed (96% in)
- Then the wreckage will not become a funereal mount above me, but will serve as a height I have climbed to attain a wider field of vision.3.3 Part 3 Chapter 3 — Anti-Greed (95% in)
- I love you, my dearest, with that blindest passion of my body which comes from the clearest perception of my mind-and my love for you is the only attainment of my past that will be left to me, unchanged, through all the years ahead.3.3 Part 3 Chapter 3 — Anti-Greed (95% in)
- They remained silent, letting the room be filled by the sounds which centuries of men and of struggle had established as the symbol of joyous attainment: the blast of the cork, the laughing tinkle of a pale gold liquid running into two broad cups filled with the weaving reflections of candles, the whisper of bubbles rising through two crystal stems, almost demanding that everything in sight rise, too, in the same aspiration.3.4 Part 3 Chapter 4 — Anti-Life (49% in)
- He remembered her hammering derision of his work, his mills, his Metal, his success, he remembered her desire to see him drunk, just once, her attempts to push him into infidelity, her pleasure at the thought that he had fallen to the level of some sordid romance, her terror on discovering that that romance had been an attainment, not a degradation.3.6 Part 3 Chapter 6 — The Concerto of Deliverance (33% in)
- When you cried in despair for the unattainable spirit which you felt had deserted your world, you gave it my name, but what you were calling was your own betrayed self-esteem.3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (86% in)
There are no more uses of "attain" in Atlas Shrugged.
Typical Usage
(best examples)