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1 " When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead. "
― Susan Elizabeth Phillips , Ain't She Sweet?
2 " The day came when she discovered sex, sensuality, and literature; she said, 'I submit! Let my life be henceforth ruled by poetry. Let me reign as the queen of my dreams until I become nothing less than the heroine of God. "
― Roman Payne
3 " I can't imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him. "
― Julia Quinn
4 " I never told her the other story, in which she stars, in which she is always the heroine – a romanticized story full of cliché images in which I am telling her all the things there has not been enough time for, in which we are doing all the things there has not been time for… "
― Penelope Lively , Moon Tiger
5 " That´s the problem with planning a late night supper after the opera, not only does the hero or the heroine die singing, but you end up famished after the last notes of the finale. "
― E.A. Bucchianeri , Brushstrokes of a Gadfly, (Gadfly Saga, #1)
6 " For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom. "
― Rebecca Solnit , Wanderlust: A History of Walking
7 " Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. "
― Nora Ephron
8 " He was savoring for the first time the ineffable subtleties of feminine refinement. Never had he encountered this grace of language, this quiet taste in dress, these relaxed, dove like postures. He marveled at the sublimity of her soul and at the lace on her petticoat. With her ever-changing moods, by turns brooding and gay, chattering and silent, fiery and casual, she aroused in him a thousand desires, awakening instincts or memories. She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague " she" of all the poetry books. "
9 " Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in tow ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death. "
― Italo Calvino , If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
10 " Thus, she had learned a romance book was fiction. A hero who truly cared for the heroine was called a fantasy. "
― Cherise Sinclair , Show Me, Baby (Masters of the Shadowlands #8.5)
11 " The Coward will run away from danger, only to strike in the dark. The Heroine will run through the dark, even though she knows the coward is waiting to strike. "
― David A. Cleinman
12 " One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love. "
― Alain de Botton , How Proust Can Change Your Life
13 " In the Blue Room, Cora Cash was trying to concentrate on her book. Cora found most novels hard to sympathise with -- all those plain governesses -- but this one had much to recommend it. The heroine was 'handsome, clever, and rich', rather like Cora herself. Cora knew she was handsome -- wasn't she always referred to in the papers as 'the divine Miss Cash'? She was clever -- she could speak three languages and could handle calculus. And as to rich, well, she was undoubtedly that. Emma Woodhouse was not rich in the way that she, Cora Cash, was rich. Emma Woodhouse did not lie on a lit à la polonaise once owned by Madame du Barry in a room which was, but for the lingering smell of paint, an exact replica of Marie Antoinette's bedchamber at le petit Trianon. Emma Woodhouse went to dances at the Assembly Rooms, not fancy dress spectaculars in specially built ballrooms. But Emma Woodhouse was motherless which meant, thought Cora, that she was handsome, clever, rich and free. "
― Daisy Goodwin , The American Heiress
14 " That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands. "
― Anna Godbersen , Envy (Luxe, #3)
15 " I know, I know…there’s something cliché about that. The heroine initially wanting to clobber a protagonist male, but later realizing that he’s grown on her and she actually really likes him. Technically, I’m not supposed to find that appealing. But maybe real life is a lot more cliché than anyone wants to admit. Or maybe there’s just a fine, subjective line between the cliché and the poetic. "
― Angela N. Blount , Once Upon a Road Trip (Once Upon a Road Trip, #1)
16 " France is to me the heroine in the romance of all the nations of all time. This feeling was born in me years ago when I read how her noble sons had defended America in its cradle. Today I am proud that I am one of the millions who will come to save our heroine from the clutches of the villain from across the Rhine. "
― , That's War
17 " I won't do this movie because I don't believe the love story," she told Selznick. " The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can't fall in love so deeply. "
18 " It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger; drawing forth a dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and, just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard: and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle: where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of places from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company, carolling perpetually.Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on; which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous. "
― Charles Dickens , Oliver Twist
19 " I am not the heroine of this story.And I'm not trying to be cute. It's the truth. I'm diagnosed borderline and seriously fucked-up. I hold grudges. I bottle my hate until it ferments into poison, and then I get high off the fumes. I'm completely dysfunctional and that's the way I like it, so don't expect a character arc where I finally find Redemption, Growth, and Change, or learn How to Forgive Myself and Others. "
― Leah Raeder , Black Iris
20 " The romance genre is the only genre where readers are guaranteed novels that place the heroine at the heart of the story. These are books that celebrate women's heroic virtues and values: courage, honor, determination and a belief in the healing power of love. "
― Jayne Ann Krentz