“Perhaps elements like tenacity and humility combine to form a heroic compound.”

“As we age we begin to grasp at youthful bliss like a life raft in a sea of harsh reality.”

“I asked my Greek chorus about this sort of hero: the Underappreciated Personification of Resolve.”

“If, as has been postulated before, heroism happens when courage meets circumstance, what if the circumstances are mundane?”

“These people were smiling because they were where they wanted to be. They understood that life is too short for what-ifs and complications. Life, they found, can be as simple as reading the wind.”

“It could be that the hope was in the adventure, the honor in the pursuit, the pride in the doing.”

“A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal misery - and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core.”