Self-pity, a dominant characteristic of sociopaths, is also the characteristic that differentiates heroic storytelling from psychological rumination. When you talk about your experiences to shed light, you may feel wrenching pain, grief, anger, or shame. Your audience may pity you, but not because you want them to.
Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.
I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F – it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well.
He lives out in Orchard Park. I mean, to be able to sit on the bench so patiently, for whatever part, and to be able to get up and do something, with such heroic competencies would be great.
To me, it feels like ‘The Doctor’ has to have a long coat, and that’s something imprinted on me from childhood, because he always did. And there’s something heroic in a flapping coat, but at the same time, I need to get rid of it sometimes and just be a scrawny guy in a suit that doesn’t quite fit.
I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves. And sometimes they can be really revealing.
Because of the mainstreaming of academia’s victimhood culture, we are now in a place where we place more value on being a victim than on being heroic, charitable, or even kind.
I do not subscribe to a feminism that demands perfection or super heroic nobility of women. But I do insist that putting women at the service of patriarchy is no victory for us.
When you’re younger, you’re going to be cast as the heroic, earnest leading man.
I was not the young heroic model for ‘Hamlet.’ I tended to play those characters that orbited around them: the rogues and the rat bags and the idiots and the fools and the clowns that sway the plot somehow from a tangent.
I am a big believer in the power of journalism; it’s a heroic pursuit.
I’m not saying this in a condescending kind of way, but it’s quite simple: The making of America was a heroic thing. Australia has a much murkier, much more complex view of its history. It’s just full of all these open wounds we don’t really know what to do with.
When Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s government fell in May 1940, the nation turned to Churchill. At last, his unique qualities were brought to bear on a supreme challenge, and with his unshakable optimism, his heroic vision, and above all, his splendid speeches, Churchill roused the spirit of the British people.
I don’t really think of Odo as a heroic lead, but that’s nice if you do.
Since we were kids, we grow up believing that astronauts are heroes – that to go up in a rocket is a heroic thing. These guys are bigger than movie stars. To me, it’s… all a well-dressed-up lie, basically. There’s billions spent on rockets up there, and there’s millions starving down here. It don’t make sense to me.
An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative.
We had a heroic attitude to artistic freedom, and we thought normal contracts were a bit vulgar – somehow not punk. But that was the whole point – we weren’t a regular record label.
Certain emotions just take you to the notes – being furious, heroic, sad, erotic, when rain comes.
Outside of my family, I was always inspired by true heroic stories of leadership and survival. For example, the story of the Shackleton expedition, when their ship became lodged in the Antarctic ice pack while exploring.
Like prospecting in the 19th century, reconnaissance of the asteroids would of necessity take place in an arena where trouble is likely and help is distant. Heroic stories of individual triumph and failure, set on landscapes never seen by humankind, are in the cards.
For me, writing a novel is more like digging a well than climbing a mountain – some heroic thing where I set out to conquer. I just sit quietly for a few years, and then it starts to become something.
I think there are good men and women in all decades. We’ve grown cynical. And look at what we do to all our heroes: Churchill, FDR, Kennedy, they all had affairs. But heroic things happen every day.
Because of England’s lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go on to Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at working- or lower middle-class characters.
Everybody was trying to put me in action movies and heroic roles, and I wanted to find more complex things. They just didn’t suit my taste, so I thought, ‘OK, I have to be brave enough to say no.’ And for a while, that hurt me immeasurably in the Hollywood world.
There are certain functions that a writer has to do. In a time of crisis, it is great to have heroic poems, as it was in the Irish Revolution. It’s great to have great songs, because people need something to sing when they are marching. That’s OK, but it should be on the side. It’s not the ultimate thing.
People throughout time have grieved, have fallen in love, have fallen out of love. We are sometimes petty and sometimes heroic, and we have been that way forever.
One of the secrets of Fox News’ outsized success – it’s the most profitable news organisation in the U.S. and, quite likely, the world – is that it saw the country full of liberal occupiers and Fox News’ viewers as the heroic resistance.
The truth is that ideas matter… If we really want to repair what is wrong in our society, it is going to require not just new policies or even new behaviors, but nothing less heroic than new ideas.
The first thought that I had about really trying to get sober was, ‘Man, I could do a lot of good in the world. I can lead by example and just be this heroic recovery guy.’ And that’s just a bad reason to get sober. You can’t get sober for anybody’s benefit, let alone the world at large. You really got to do it for yourself.
Failures to heroic minds are the stepping stones to success.
I wasn’t heroic because I was never in danger.
The most heroic word in all languages is revolution.
Blacks had survived every form of human debasement with ingenuity, self-reliance, a deep and ironic humor, a capacity for self-reinvention and a heroic fortitude. But we had no experience of wide-open freedom.
There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.
In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.
The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.
After 1945, shamefully, we Brits seemed dedicated to punishing the heroic Poles at every turn for their wartime loyalty.
Playing big, heroic characters with heart is always a lot of fun. I enjoy making movies like that, and a lot of people love to live vicariously through those characters.
I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge or Virtue or Goodness or Victory but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!
Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
We kind of forget because what television tends to do with these professions like lawyers and doctors and police officers, we create them on such a heroic level that you kind of forget that these are really people.
All my artistic response comes from American things, and I guess I’ve always had a weakness for heroic imagery.
Some people might say my coming out after just winning the MVP award is heroic, and I understand that.
I suppose the textbook definition of an anti-hero is pretty straightforward – a protagonist who embodies not only heroic characteristics but also some characteristics typically deemed non-heroic, even villainous.
Emily Dickinson has haunted my life – her poems, her persona, all the tales about her solitude. Ever since I discovered her in the seventh grade, I’ve had a crush on that spinster in white, who had such a heroic and startling inner landscape of her own.
What is a society without a heroic dimension?
That whole heroic notion of the women warriors known as Amazons is extremely appealing. It was appealing in antiquity, and, throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, they’re always portrayed as heroic, courageous, and the equals of men, and that’s just extremely attractive and has been since antiquity.
To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.
The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
Most lawyers aren’t trial lawyers. Most lawyers, even trial lawyers, don’t get their problems solved in a courtroom. We like to go to court. It seems heroic to go to court. We think we’re the new, great advocates, better than anything we’ve seen on TV, and we come home exhilarated by having gone to court.
