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Heros Quotes

Browse 25 quotes about Heros.

Heros Quotes

“...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get. See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On. The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour. And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes.”

AmericaFantasyBlogNarrativesHerosMythcon
Author:Catherynne M. Valente
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“The story of Superman is functionally now a mythological influence to heroic characters within other stories that are meant to serve as mythological influences to us real-world humans. His seems to be a sort of prime contemporary hero story from which other contemporary hero stories emerge and draw their influence.”

PhilosophyInfluencePersonal DevelopmentSuperheroesHeros
Book:The Heroic and Exceptional Minority: A Guide to Mythological Self-Awareness and Growth
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“The poetry of Homer, sprung from the soil of legend, is not yet wholly detached from it, even as the figures of a bas-relief adhere to an extraneous backing of the original block. These figures are but slightly raised, and in the epic poem all is painted as past and remote. In bas- relief the figures are usually in profile, and in the epos all are characterized in the simplest manner in relief; they are not grouped together, but follow one another; so Homer's heroes advance, one by one, in succession before us. It has been remarked that the Iliad is not definitively closed, but that we are left to suppose something both to precede and to follow it. The bas-relief is equally without limit, and may be continued ad infinitum, either from before or behind, on which account the ancients preferred for it such subjects as admitted of an indefinite extension, sacrificial processions, dances, and lines of combatants, &c. Hence they also exhibited bas-reliefs on curved surfaces, such as vases, or the frieze of a rotunda, where, by the curvature, the two ends are withdrawn from our sight, and where, while we advance, one object appears as another disappears. Reading Homer is very much like such a circuit; the present object alone arresting our attention, we lose sight of that which precedes, and do not concern ourselves about what is to follow.”

HomerHerosStylesBas Relief
Book:Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature
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“Not a direct quote, but referenced in the author's note at the end - Sister Elizabeth Kenny, was instrumental in developing a new method of treating polio. Barbara Johnson, a laboratory technician who was paralyzed with polio after a workplace accident but went on the work with Sabin as his statistician. Isabel Morgan vaccine successfully induced immunity in monkeys and was the basis of Jonas Salk's entry into the vaccine race. We'd be talking about the Morgan vaccine if she hadn't refused to test the vaccine on children. Elsie Ward perfected the technique for growing the virus outside a living body. Her technique allowed Salk's lab to make enough of the virus to put in the vaccines for millions of children. Whistleblower Bernice Eddy reported that test monkeys who got the vaccine from Cutter laboratories were developing polio, thus alerting officials that Cutter would be releasing unsafe vaccines for use. -- Her concerns were ignored and caused 200 children to acquire Polio through the vaccine. Many of the children were paralyzed. Some died. Federal regulations of vaccines was tightened because of this - and her. Eleanor Abbott invented the game Candy Land to amuse patients after she herself was hospitalized for the disease.”

HerosForgotten WomenUnrecognized Women
Book:The Woman With the Cure
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