Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.
And I believe we need heroes, I believe we need certain people who we can measure our own shortcomings by.
Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy --common clay, if you like --eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others --the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes.
Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.
The more characteristic American hero in the earlier day, and the more beloved type at all times, was not the hustler but the whittler.
Their son is a hero. He went to Iraq and thank God he didn't get a bullet, but he comes home and he gets three bullets....
Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.
The main thing about being a hero is to know when to die.