"'... Maybe it came too late. I don't know. Young people think that you forge what happens on the way when you get there. But you don't. Something stays. I'll always remember how I was a boy--in a little place down in Georgia, that was--and how I ran errands for the harness maker, and the kids laughed when carriages drove by and splashed mud all over my pants. That's how long ago I decided that some day I'd have a house of my own, the kind of a house that carriages stop before. After that, no matter how hard it got to be at times, I'd always think of that house, and it helped. Afterward, there were years when I was afraid of it--I could have built it, but I was afraid. Well, now the time has come. Do you understand, Mr. Roark? Austen said you'd be just the man who'd understand. ' 

'Yes,' said Roark eagerly, 'I do.' ... 

... When Roark began to speak Mr. Mundy listened, in polite astonishment. He did not seem to resent the words. They did not penetrate. 

'Don't you see?' Roark was saying. 'It's a monument you want to build, but not to yourself. Not to your life or your achievement. To other people. To their supremacy over you. You're not challenging that supremacy. You're immortalizing it. You haven't thrown it off--you're putting it up forever. Will you be happy if you seal yourself for the rest of your life in that borrowed shape? Or if you strike free, for once, and build a new house, your own? You don't want the Randolph place. You want what it stood for. But what it stood for is what you've fought all your life.' 

Mr. Mundy listened blankly. And Roark felt again ia bewildered helplessness before unreality: there was no such person as Mr. Mundy; there were only the remnants, long dead, of the people who had inhabited the Randolph place; one could not plead with remnants or convince them."

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand