The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It's usually a cycle, a coming and a returning.

The hero’s journey can take place on a battlefield or in a cubicle. We can live it out amid public clamor or in the soundless vault between our ears. The demons we are dueling are always the same. They are our own fears of becoming who we are. No one who has ever lived — or ever will — has a journey like ours. And yet our journey is universal. It is every woman’s and every man’s.

Heroes inevitably experience at least one very big failure that tests whether they have the resilience to come back and fight smarter and with more determination.

The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, “always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.

Because being American is more than a pride we inherit — It's the past we step into, and how we repair it.

To evolve out of this position of psychological immaturity to the courage of self-responsibility and assurance requires a death and a resurrection. That’s the basic motif of the universal hero’s journey — leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition.

It’s a compulsive need to wreck everything. You might notice there’s a pattern of stripping down and building back up again throughout my life. I guess that’s how some of us conduct our lives.

The hero wanders. The hero suffers. The hero returns. You are that hero.

On our hero's journey, we see, we experience, we suffer. We learn. On our hero's journey, we acquire a history that is ours alone. It's a secret history, a private history, a personal history. No one has it but us. No one knows it but us. This secret history is the most valuable possession we hold, or ever will hold. We will draw upon it for the rest of our lives.

Every day America's destroyed and re-created,
America is what you do,
America is I and you,
America is what you choose to make it.

At the end of their journey, a hero may stand in the same place where their story started, but nevertheless they have been irrevocably shifted, altered, displaced.

The hill we climb, if only we dare it: Because being American is more than a pride we inherit — It’s the past we step into, and how we repair it.

Love is a hero’s journey, and the hero’s journey is a noble but difficult path.

The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle.