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Heroes Quotes

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Heroes Quotes

“Heroes Heroes kill their enemies Theatre war Usually With the sword With the rifle With the bomb With words With bare hands With hatred in their eyes Dazzled Inside From hatred furrowed As machines Stereotype Inside Cold steel Inside True Heroes Counter Their enemies inside Delete the flames The delusions of The unrestrained blaze Without the sword Without the gun Without the bomb Without words Without using bare hands To kill people”

“If metaphors require an underlying cultural framework, then the heiroglyphhic language of the gods cannot be a merely primitive stage of human consciousness: it needs the presence of both the symbolic language of heroes and the epistolary language of me as its starting point. Thus Vico is not speaking of a linear development from a metaphorical language to a more conventional language, but of a continual, cyclical activity. The language of the gods is a heap of unrelated synedoches and metonymies…”

“It wasn’t like this in the stories. In the old tales, when a young man went forth to have adventures, he endured his trials and came forth triumphant. He became a leader, or acquired a magical skill, or at the very least wed a princess. Maybe all three. There was never any question, not even in the darkest moment, that the hero would conquer both his enemies and his self-doubt. Perhaps that was why I had been angry with Simon, because I wanted the ending of his story to be the good one he deserved.”

“We create Hollywood and Disneyland to carry our projections of greatness. But as a society we are putting ourselves at risk in this process, for a celebrity may not be a true hero. As the great mythologist Joseph Campbell once pointed out, the celebrity lives only for his or her own ego, while the hero acts to redeem society. We have many celebrities but few true heroes these days. Modern Westerners have evolved psychologically to the point where we are placing our gold on living beings rather than dead bones, as was done in medieval times, but it remains to be seen whether we can learn to carry our own gold and find heaven within instead of without.”

“I can remember Miss Temple walking lightly and rapidly along our drooping line, her plaid cloak, which the frosty wind fluttered, gathered close about her, and encouraging us, by precept and example, to keep up our spirits, and march forward, as she said, "like stalwart soldiers." The other teachers, poor things, were generally themselves too much dejected to attempt the task of cheering others.”

“The air between us feels alive, and the grin that I've been wearing since I spotted her deepens as my cock gets hard at the thought that nothing stands between us now. I could pull her into my arms, slide my hands inside her shirt to feel her soft silky skin while I bury my nose in her neck and whisper how happy I am to see her again.”

“But to me, what the Greeks knew and what these other ancient authors, I think, tapped into is something we’re only now finding words to articulate again, which is that betrayal is the wound that cuts the deepest. You can call it whatever you want, moral distress, moral injury, but really, it’s betrayal — feeling abandoned or betrayed, or betraying oneself and one’s sense of what’s right. And so we had respiratory therapists in some of our early performances during the pandemic, who were saying, “I have 20 patients on respirators in the public hospital in the Bronx, and there’s only me, and I’m left with the guilt of not being able to attend to them all.” That’s an impossible situation. So you call that person a hero, when they’re wrestling with their own sense of betraying their own standards of care and being betrayed by the system that put them in that position, and it could actually hurt them.”

“But as the sun started to rise over the hills, they were off, on the wide-open road, heading for his home. The one he somehow needed to take this tight-assed woman to, along with her scrap of a mangy cat, the one with half an ear missing. 
Because if he hadn’t wrangled her into coming, somehow, this time, in a very weird, unexpected way…
…it wouldn’t have felt as much like his home. At all.”

“Of course, some adjustments had to be made [to heroic quests]. For example, when a giant sea serpent had been spotted idling in the ocean, no doubt scouting for a pleasant coastline to ravage, they had known it would attack a maiden tied to a rock. The only problem had been getting a maiden to volunteer to be tied to a rock. No one in Bolvudis particularly wanted to end up inside a sea serpent’s stomach. Asvin had been very surprised, until Gaam had explained that it was not always the case that a hero’s mere presence would cast all damsels in the area into perilous predicaments he could rescue them from. Most of the rescues in the legends were, Gaam said, either fictitious or pre-arranged, and hardly ever sheer coincidence or fate. In the end a grumbling Maya had let herself be tied to a rock while Asvin, sword in hand, prowled the beach. The fact that the serpent’s arrival had created a huge wave that had swept Gaam and Asvin far away and Maya had had to burn off her ropes and kill the monster on her own was, they all agreed, best kept secret.”

“We were singing for Dr. Du Bois' spirit, for the invaluable contributions he made, for his shining intellect and his courage. To many of us he was the first American Negro intellectual. We knew about Jack Johnson and Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. We were proud of Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes. We memorized the verses of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Countee Cullen, but they were athletes, musicians and poets, and White folks thought all those talents came naturally to Negroes. So, while we survived because of those contributors and their contributions, the powerful White world didn't stand in awe of them. Sadly, we also tended to take those brilliances for granted. But W.E.B. Du Bois and of course Paul Robeson were different, held on a higher or at least on a different plateau than the others.”

“Folks don’t give themselves enough credit. The mother who endures cavities so her children can get braces. The father who works a dead-end job so his kids can have a roof over their heads. The daughter who sacrifices college so she can take care of her disabled mother. They are all heroes.”

“What does freedom mean? It means warriors are fighting for you, defenses are protecting you, and soldiers are sacrificing to preserve your ability to speak, to act, to live, and to express yourself in a world where a great many aggressors would oppress those freedoms if not for the heroic resistance preventing them.”

“The man laughed. “When my grandpa used to tell me stories, lots of times, he finished by telling me the same thing. They are all the same, boy. The woodcutter who saved Little Red Riding Hood, the good fairy, Santa Claus, any good guy you care to name. All the same. When someone needs something and deserves it, he or she shows up in exactly the right disguise to fit the occasion.”