Harvey Pekar Quotes

Heroism's just doing more than you want to do or think you can. Sometimes it's just doing the crappy things, the unhappy things other people won't do....It's not just jumping out of a plane onto a glacier ten thousand feet up because there's nobody else there to do it. It's getting out of bed in the morning when it seems like too much trouble.

One of the jobs of a writer is to add nuance and ambiguity to that straight line that people often draw to very specific kinds of heroism. Most of us don't get to be Snooki. For most of us heroism has to be in our everyday lives.

What is the commonest, and yet the least remembered form of heroism? The heroism of an average mother. Ah! when I think of that broad fact I gather hope again for poor humanity, and this dark world looks bright, this diseased world looks wholesome to me once more, because, whatever else it is or is not full of, it is at least full of mothers.

Someone once told me the one thread that runs through them all is a premium on personal courage - not intellectual courage, but just plain physical courage.

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

The greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.

I consider myself an ordinary person.

I think I'm a fairly average person, I think I have only a medium IQ. I didn't go to college, obviously.

...[Y]ou have an inner strength that makes it possible for you to do things other people couldn't even begin to think of doing.

I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.

Forget yourself! Think courage.

Man's greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes.

Everybody likes an extraordinary person or likes to think that they would be great with a superpower in an ordinary world.

What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin'? Well you're not! You're not! You're no crazier than the average asshole out walkin' around on the streets and that's it.

You have to be very cautious about what you are doing for charity and things like that. I think you have to start with your life. I think that's what life is expecting you to do. In your family, in your surroundings, in your work life, in the people you're with, your relationships; how you behave and doing what you need to accomplish. That for me is being a hero every day of your life.

What makes a heroine? I think I can answer that. A heroine is a woman who risks going too far in order to find out how far one can go for a cause greater than herself.

I have discovered that even the mediocre can have adventures and even the fearful can achieve.

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.

Saba used to say there was a difference between bravery and courage. Bravery was doing something dangerous without thinking. Courage was walking into danger, knowing full well the risks.

I think we must cling to the hope that we can see in the great heroism, the bravery of the firemen and policemen, and the outpouring of caring and concern that has come pouring in from around the world.

The average person is either a weakling, or just a happy person who wants to get along, or thinks being tough is having big muscles and strutting around town and having a good-looking girlfriend.

I think ultimately the film 'Room' is a kind of hymn to motherhood and to the everyday heroism of parents who find their smiles in terrible times.

I think it's a sign that the establishment is going to have to change. For too long they never thought about the average person, because the average person is not organized.

People ask me how come you've been around so long. Well, it's through playing the part of Mr Average Joe American.

The beauty of America is that the average person always thinks she is above average.