"Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying. 'I will try again tomorrow.'" Mary Anne Radmacher.

A card smaller than an index card displaying the phrase hangs on the hall closet at the top of the stairs at home.

Impossible to miss, the card is bright pink and at eye level. Open or close the closet door and the petite sign is there, as a reminder to gather resolve and stand up to whatever challenge the next day brings.

Can you imagine gathering the resolve to stand up to the challenge of the next day when the challenge may be at the lethal end of a pistol?

Malala Yousafzi, this year's co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize, describes doing so in her book "I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban," a New York Times bestseller.

The outspoken children's rights activist imagined an ambush on a flight of stairs leading to her home, she writes. Yousafzi pictured herself coming home when "a terrorist might jump out and shoot me on those steps."

In her mind, she prepared talking points to use when confronting her imagined attacker.

On Oct. 9, 2012, two attackers from the Taliban stopped the van Malala was riding on her way home from school in the Swat Valley of Pakistan.

One attacker buttonholed the driver with questions. Another boarded the rear of the van and asked other students to identify Malala.

The attacker fired three shots. One bullet struck Malala, 15, in the left eye and she slumped into her best friend's lap. The other shots struck two schoolmates.

Earlier this month, in a press conference soon after her award was announced, Malala, now 17, spoke of courage.

"I felt more powerful and more courageous because this award ... is an encouragement for me to go forward and believe in myself," Malala said of the moment she learned she was a Nobel laureate. She was at school when the news came from a teacher.

"This award is especially for them (children around the world). It gives them courage."

I don't know about you but when I was 17 courage did not have worldwide implications but was more a matter of mustering up the nerve to ask parental permission to go to a rock concert.

"Through my story, I want to tell other children all around the world that they should stand up for their rights. They should not wait for someone else," Malala said to reporters at a news conference in Birmingham, England, where she now lives in exile with her family.

To step up, to speak up, to listen to the quiet voice at the end of the day encouraging another try tomorrow, all types of courage in their own right.

Every now and then, however, an exemplar like Malala Yousafzi, activist for girl's education and children's rights, illustrates courage writ large.

"I used to say that I think I do not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize," Malala said at the close of the press conference. "I still think that. I have received this award but it is not the end."

Malala is the youngest person and the first person from her native Pakistan to be a Nobel laureate.

Let's hope this, as she sees it, is just the start for Malala, who now is setting a goal of becoming what she describes as "a good politician."

If anyone can define such an entity, it is she.

Congratulations, Malala Yousfazi.

April Peterson

editorial assistant

East Penn Press

Salisbury Press