Doug Williams

“All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim O'Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough—if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough—I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Fear and anger always come hand in hand. Anger is my hiding place from fear, my shield and my sword against it.”
― Jim Butcher, Grave Peril

“Fear is bred from ignorance. So knowledge is a weapon against it, and reason is the tool of knowledge.”
― Jim Butcher, Grave Peril