Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.

Being a bad guy was easy, being a hero was hard.

Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks who look boring from the outside - some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me - we aren't so special, bro.

The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion.

Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting: that our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any of us as are the present and the past.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.