for nomads "How can" - she tried to stop, but the words burst involuntarily, in helpless indignant protest, whether against him, fate or the outer world, she could not tell - "how can she live through eleven months [of your absence] of thinking that you, at any moment, might be...?" She did not finish.
He was smiling, but he saw the enormous solemnity of that which he and his wife had needed to earn their right to this kind of smile. "She can live through it, Miss Taggart, because we do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction. We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it - and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life."

Excerpt of "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand (p.696), an interesting book, which is currently challenging many believes I hold, and which reconfirms many others.  ¶ 2:09 PM