Main Character Quotes

“I'll tell you a secret about storytelling. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty... were not perfect in the beginning. It's only a happy ending on the last page, right? If the princess had everything from the beginning, there wouldn't be a story. Anyone who is imperfect or incomplete can become the main character in the story.”
― PEACH－PIT, Shugo Chara!, Vol. 2: Friends in Need

“it was such a lovely night. The moon was round and large, framed perfectly between the buildings like the main character in her own film, reflecting off the windows, cascading silvery light into the warm orange of the streetlights.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“He finally returned my gaze, and held it. A knot lodged in my throat, because he was closer than I expected, and his eyelashes were darker than I expected, and long, and there was a gray rim around the inside of his irises that looked like crowns of storm clouds surrounding a peridot. His gaze made the butterflies in my stomach shake off their hibernation and want to remember how to flutter again.
Oh yes, he had to be the main character.
Book boyfriend material, once someone fixed him up.
But then: Where was his heroine?”
― Ashley Poston, A Novel Love Story

“If the windmill should prove too formidable, I may see what can be done with the wind.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“Tom Argent had once loved fairy tales. When he was very young, he had loved to read about princes, and kings, and queens, and fairies, and goblins, and magic. He even liked to pretend that he was the son of a fairy queen, or a pirate king, who had been adopted by humans, and one day would claim his kingdom.
His parents had grown concerned at this. They had never hidden the fact that Tom was adopted, and they knew that all children liked to pretend. But Tom's imagination was especially vivid. He loved his parents very much, but they were afraid that this daydreaming might lead him to reject them one day. And so, they had both gone out of their way to discourage his love of fairy tales.
Whenever they saw him with his books, they would tell him: 'Stories aren't real. Magic is just an illusion. Fairies don't exist, Tom. Only trust what you can see.'
Then, on his seventh birthday, they had given Tom a camera, and the books of fairy tales had vanished swiftly and silently overnight, to be replaced by magazines devoted to different types of lens, in which the young Tom Argent had found another kind of magic. But looking at these images of the mysterious girl, he felt as if he had returned to the world of those long-ago storybooks, and it felt both exciting and wonderful, and deeply, darkly dangerous.”
― Joanne Harris, The Moonlight Market

“She seemed to feed on their laughter, and they on her humor, like the lily of the pond—sustained by the very water it purified.”
― Molly Collier, The Paragon

“Knowledge is meant to be shared," Kiela said. "Books were never meant to be locked up. Hoarding them, keeping knowledge from people, is the same as hoarding magic. It's wrong."
"You sound like a revolutionary," Dax commented.
Kiela shot him a look.
He held up his hands. "Which is great. They weren't wrong. It's true for music too— it's not meant to be limited to concert halls only attended by the wealthy. It should be spread and shared."
"Exactly," Kiela said, mollified.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, Sea of Charms

“But Tom was no believer in fairy tales and miracles. He could walk through a bluebell wood and not see a single fairy--- not that there were any bluebell woods in London, but there were parks with ancient trees, and markets filled with spices and fruits from countries a thousand miles away, and people of all races and types, and cobbled alleys that echoed with ghosts, and ships that only appeared by night, and secret plague pits under the ground.”
― Joanne Harris, The Moonlight Market

“we live so loudly that if our lives / become history it will be written in bold”
― Reese Lieberman, living proof: poems and prose

“How do I know I'm the main character? I could be a diversionary subplot, or a way to keep the Plot Armor out of the hands of the main character long enough for the real main character to use it, couldn't I?”
― Kevin Hess, The Dragon of Dire Verses

“I know. I know. Me? Dutiful daughter? All-round good girl? Owner of an up-and-coming event-planning company? Killer of plants and unwed at thirty? Pulling a heist?
Guilty as charged.”
― Sara Desai, 'Til Heist Do Us Part

“Vanessa called me Moth. But Charissa told me I hadn't declared my true colors yet. What did she mean?'
'She meant that your allegiance remains undetermined,' said Burnet. 'Argent is a name that can refer both to a Moth and a Butterfly. It means that you choose your colors, instead of having them imposed by birth.”
― Joanne Harris, The Moonlight Market

“You don't belong in Jack's world, and he doesn't belong in yours. My advice is to get out while you can."
I glared at him with a mixture of disbelief and annoyance. "You think you know everything about me, but I'm not a nice girl. I've done bad things. I've been arrested, handcuffed, and interrogated in the police station as an accessory to crime. I've broken laws. I've been threatened, kidnapped, tied up, and was an active participant in a high-speed car chase. I know who Jack is. I have a good idea about what he does. And I can make my own decision about whether we're good together or not, which, by the way, we are, subject to smoothing out a few wrinkles."
George chuckled. "So, you're saying that what you see isn't what you get. You're no lightweight."
"Damn right.”
― Sara Desai, 'Til Heist Do Us Part

“I was the main character in my own life, and I refused- refused- to fall secondary to the villain.”
― Jennifer Hartmann, Older

“Je me sens comme dans un film, où l'héroïne embarque dans un train vers une nouvelle aventure. Suis-je une héroïne ? Un personnage principal ? Il semble que oui, en tout cas, je suis le personnage principal de ma propre vie en ce moment, et bon sang, ça fait du bien.”
― Charlie, Les couleurs du changement

“I promise not to treat you like some damsel I'm trying to save."
"That's right. If anyone here is a princess, it's you.”
― Mia P. Manansala, Guilt and Ginataan

“An important note about Roxannah's background. In my conversation with Dr. Jessica Sanderson (please see Author Acknowledgements), what became obvious to me was that childhood wounds cause us to break down differently. The same wound can cause one person to break toward control, while another breaks toward fragility. We break toward hyper-vigilance, catastrophic thinking, workaholism, or worthlessness. Our deepest wounds can wear a thousand faces. But The Queen's Cook is a not a book about childhood trauma. It is the story of a woman who through hardship finds friendship, love, and a life-changing relationship with God.”
― Tessa Afshar, The Queen's Cook

“Soigne: Pronounced swan-yay, it is French for "elegant."
It is/was used to describe an exceptionally sexy, well-presented dish, but quickly devolved from trendy to dated and pretentious.”
― Terri-Lynne DeFino, Didn't You Use to Be Queenie B?

“The main character and the hero. They aren’t the same thing.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Doha wasn’t a very good friend.
But he was a good person.
And he was a great engineer.”
― Molly Collier, The Paragon

“He looked distraught, though perhaps he always looked like that, given that he didn’t eat enough or sleep enough or witness sunlight anywhere other than through a small window in a dark workshop.”
― Molly Collier, The Paragon

“And the lesson here is that people are unlikeable. They have the irritating habit of believing they are as important as you are to the story.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“I am re-inventing myself, writing my own story; changing my name to fit the course that I have chosen for myself. The old woman called me Vianne Rocher. Not Rochas, but Rocher, like the chocolate. This seems meaningful, somehow. As if that village on the Baïse and the chocolaterie on Allée du Pieu might both be part of my future. And before I settle anywhere, I need to learn how to be Vianne.”
― Joanne Harris, Vianne

“Minha's gift was her sense of taste. Her ability to savor. Big, bold tango and fandango on her tongue. The shift, the hint, the smallest component of flavor eked out and found, considered, remembered. When the unwanted fairy godmother, unseen and unknown, turned up at her birth, she did not bequeath a prophecy, or a fairy-tale ending. No. She endowed the infant Minha with the ability to experience, wildly, vividly, appetite.”
― Catherine Kurtz, Feast

“At the heart of the crowd walked a girl with merry eyes, a floating violet in a sea of cut-velvet and silk hose, cloth-of-silver and the smell of myrrh, concentrating as she held her skirt clear of puddles. This was Anne, duchess regnant of Brittany, her hair caught back in a diadem and a pearl-studded crespine, though she wore no other jewels. They had all been sold to pay her garrisons.”
― Katherine Arden, The Unicorn Hunters

“Countless tales and songs had been written about the cliffs of Iro and Nane: they'd been painted by two lovers, one who lived on one island and one on another. Their parents had forbidden them to marry, and so they painted their love in the colors of sunrise and sunset. Discovering this, their families had tried to wash the paint away, but the very rocks had been stained by the two artists' love and, regardless of how hard their relatives scrubbed and chipped at the stone, the colors didn't fade, until at last, both families relented and allowed the two to marry. To this day, no wind or rain or sea could dim the colors.
Granted, there was also the more prosaic explanation- it was just minerals in the rocks acting as a natural dye. But Marin liked the love story better. If she was never going to have her own great love- and she was done with ever wanting that- then she'd treasure the fictional ones even more.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, Sea of Charms

“Her topaz rings caught the stage lights and glittered. Her rose-water scent filled the space she occupied. Her lipstick matched the red of her nail polish.”
― Elle McNicoll, Unapologetic Love Story

“Isabella Pasternak baked treats to bring to work every day: not as a way to endear herself to her co-workers, but as a way to avoid them.
At Comestibles, the digital food magazine known for its conversational style, chic design, and hot takes on food ("Are Lima Beans the New Chickpeas?," "The Case for Canned Parmesan Cheese," "Why We're Totally Over Anchovies"), Isabella was more appreciated for her peanut-butter blondies than she was for her personality. That's because, despite years of her late father's regaling her with the same advice— "People skills matter more than book smarts!"— she refused to accept that she needed when you can hand out peppermint s'mores, write a cute essay about paninis, and call it a day? For Isabella, forced camaraderie was worse than boneless, skinless chicken breasts.”
― Adam D. Roberts, Food Person

“She held her gaze on him for a moment, then dropped it to the peach in her hands. Sun-warmed, pink-blushed, down-soft. It was a lovely thing to hold. She lifted it to her cheek, her nose, her lips. Pulled in the sweet, bright, lemon-and-rose-petal scent, reveled in the beauty of peach skin and fuzz and leaf. In memory of the last peach she had eaten in this place. To give thanks for this one too. Pearly-white-fleshed, bursting with juice. She sucked hard as she bit into it, to not drench herself as Frog had done. She was flooded nonetheless. With the joy of it, with every sweet taste of it. It sang a divine melody, bright and sharp and tangy, mellow and dark-honeyed. Ambrosial. It filled her mouth. It filled her soul. It drew a line, in all its tangled detail, between the last peach eaten there and this peach. It was the best peach, the second-best peach. The same peach. It held the far-off Mediterranean gardens of its origins, and the Kentish soil from which it grew. It was something new to add to the rich diversity of her sense memories, and something to hold apart, on its own. It washed through her. Turned a page in her heart. Unfurled something there that she had coiled so tightly, she had forgotten how violently she did so. She was unfurled now, ready to spring, to live.”
― Catherine Kurtz, Feast

“I’m looking for a Winslow Green. Is he available?”
The girl smiled, which had the odd effect of seeming to brighten the entire room. There was a smattering of freckles the same color as her hair across her rosy cheeks and pert nose. “I’m Winslow Green.”
Bastian stared at her blankly. “I— erm. What?”
“Winslow Green? This is my agency.” Her eyes, an unusual shade of periwinkle, blinked at him innocently.”
― Mara Rutherford, My Unfamiliar