#heroic

Yesterday I saved a baby, a boy, a man, and an old man from death, and all by simply not impregnating anybody. But I don't consider myself a hero. Merely heroic, and also unable to reach any of my lady friends on the phone. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#boy #death #funny #hero #heroic

On some such night as this she remembered promising to herself to live as brave and noble a life as any heroine she ever read or heard of in romance, a life sans peur et sans reproche; it had seemed to her then that she had only to will, and such a life would be accomplished. And now she had learnt that not only to will, but also to pray, was a necessary condition in the truly heroic. Trusting to herself, she had fallen. ↗

— Elizabeth Gaskell

#heroic #individual-will #noble #prayer #strength

Now there was great rejoicing at the rumor of Alderic's quest, for all folk knew that he was a cautious man, and they deemed that he would succeed and enrich the world, and they rubbed their hands in the cities at the thought of largesse; and there was joy among all men in Alderic's country, except perchance among the lenders of money, who feared they would soon be paid. And there was rejoicing also because men hoped that when the Gibbelins were robbed of their hoard, they would shatter their high-built bridge and break the golden chains that bound them to the world, and drift back, they and their tower, to the moon, from which they had come and to which they rightly belonged. There was little love for the Gibbelins, though all men envied their hoard. ("The Hoard Of The Gibbelins") ↗

— Lord Dunsany

#fantasy #greed #heroic-fantasy #loans #money-lender

An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative. ↗

— Lascelles Abercrombie

#continuous #epic #heroic #into #lays

The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age. ↗

— Lascelles Abercrombie

#ballads #border #clearly #heroic #hood

The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else. ↗

— Lascelles Abercrombie

#balance #bottom #civilized #else #founded

Some days it is a heroic act just to refuse the paralysis of fear and straighten up and step into another day. ↗

— Edward Albert

#another #another day #day #days #fear

On Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, 'What God do you pray to?' What beliefs do you hold?' ↗

— Michael Bloomberg

#asked #beliefs #buildings #burning #did

I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. ↗

— Michael Cunningham

#books #encourage #feel #gesture #heroic

As human beings, of course, we're all compromised and complex and contradictory and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there's room for me to express them, that's a part I'd love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional. ↗

— Hugo Weaving

#character #complex #compromised #contradictions #contradictory