When the heroes go off the stage, the clowns come on.
- Heinrich Heine
The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.
- Lascelles Abercrombie
The Palestinian mother is the author of the survival story of the Palestinian people. She is the heroine, the one behind the success.
- Izzeldin Abuelaish
It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.
- John Adams
The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by.
- Felix Adler
It's hard to be the one always waiting. I mean, there's something to be said for the hero who charges off to battle, but when you get right down to it there's a whole story in who's left behind.
- Jodi Picoult
...I wanted to show that the mother was the heroine as soon as possible. I'm tired of love-sick girls and runaway wives. We'll prove that there's romance in old women also.
- Louisa May Alcott
The news of the open military help to Franco from Hitler and Mussolini, and the heroic resistance of the people of Madrid, Barcelona and the big cities fired a widespread wish to help the Republic and its people.
- Bill Alexander
Though Will was saying earlier," Tessa added, "that heroes all come to bad ends, and he could not imagine why anyone would want to be one, anyway."
"Ah." Jem's hand squeezed hers briefly, and then let it go. "Well, Will is looking at it from the hero's viewpoint, isn't he? But as for the rest of us, it's an easy answer."
"Is it?"
"Of course." His voice was almost a whisper now. "Heroes endure because we need them. Not for their own sakes. If Will ...
- Cassandra Clare
Because it's much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine.
- Woody Allen
I am the hero of Africa.
- Idi Amin
The essence of a tragedy, or even of a serious play, is the spiritual awakening, or regeneration, of the hero.
- Maxwell Anderson
It wasn't until we got over the self pity that we were able to accept suffering as apart of our life with Christ. A man or woman reaches this plane only when he or she ceases to be the hero.
- Corazon Aquino
The other thing is we have an incredible villain. And we worked very hard to have villains that are connected to the hero. They have an effect, an emotional effect. They never become out-of-this-world, crazy villains.
- Avi Arad
Well, it's like that myth about the hero. He made wings out of wax so he could fly, but when he got too close to the Sun, to God, the wax melted and he crashed to the ground
- Hiromu Arakawa
I used to get some flack from my agents because I wouldn't even audition for parts where the hero uses violent force to be a hero.
- Mackenzie Astin
If you are not the hero of your own story, then you're missing the whole point of your humanity.
- Steve Maraboli
If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?
- Jane Austen
To be disgraced in the eye of the world, to wear the appearance of infamy while her heart is all purity, her actions all innocence, and the misconduct of another the true source of her debasement, is one of those circumstances which peculiarly belong to the heroine's life, and her fortitude under it what particularly dignifies her character. Catherine had fortitude too; she suffered, but no mumur passed her lips.
- Jane Austen
I can't imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him.
- Julia Quinn
In the heroic effort of the individual to attain universality, in the attempt to transcend the curse of individuation and to become the one world-being, he suffers in his own person the primordial contradiction that is concealed in things, which means that he commits sacrilege and suffers.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Everything in proximity to the hero becomes tragedy; everything in proximity to the demigod becomes satyr-play; and everything in proximity to God becomes...what? "world" perhaps?
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.
- Natalie Clifford Barney
All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged -- after all, what's good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it's a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot.
- Mary Ann Shaffer
It is very difficult to be a hero without an audience, although, in a sense, we are each the hero of a peculiar, half-ruined film called our life.
- Sebastian Barry
Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.
- John Barth
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.
- Ingrid Bergman
Each one of us has the power and must develop the will to be the hero of his own life. We believe in goals, in purposes, in achievement and in the joy of living.
- Andrew Bernstein
Nothing is given to man on earth - struggle is built into the nature of life, and conflict is possible - the hero is the man who lets no obstacle prevent him from pursuing the values he has chosen.
- Andrew Bernstein
Disdaining the heroic outfit, excitable in her methods, garrulous, episodical, shrill, she misled her lover much as she misled her aunt. He mistook her fertility for weakness. He supposed her "as clever as they make 'em," but no more, not realizing that she was penetrating to the depths of his soul, and approving of what she found there.
- E M Forster
Our film examines the heroism, courage and prowess of the Soviet submarine force in ways never seen before.
- Kathryn Bigelow
I just don't see myself as the heroine in my own narrative.
- Cate Blanchett
As you follow the escapades or the journey of the hero through a story, it evokes some kind of emotion in the viewers. The director's job is to make sure that the audience goes through the journey and has an emotional reaction.
- Don Bluth
Girls are 50% of the population. We deserve to represent 50% of the heroes.
- Tamora Pierce
One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.
- Alain De Botton
When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes with anxiety.
- Andrew Coyle Bradley
King Lear alone among these plays has a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure.
- Andrew Coyle Bradley
Faith isn't about logic, son," Haddek said. "Perhaps that's your problem. You cannot 'disprove' the things you study, any more than we can prove to you that the Hero will save us. We simply must believe it, and accept the things Preservation has taught us.
- Brandon Sanderson
Meanwhile, news has been leaked to the press that the Hero of Drummond Street will be pictured on the cover of a national magazine, nude.
- Lilian Jackson Braun
Power changes everything till it is difficult to say who are the heroes and who the villains.
- Libba Bray
A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.
- Aristide Briand
The heroes of faith in Hebrews 11... obeyed by faith... obedience is the pathway to holiness... no one will become holy apart from a life of faith. Faith enables us to claim the promises of God, but it also enables us to obey the commends of God.
- Jerry Bridges
Oh, this faithless world! Someone must deliver them. You. If not you, who? You have been saved for a reason. Show them the old demons. Remind them of their fear. Apathy is death. Without darkness, there is no light. Without evil, there is no good. Make them choose. Dark or light. Where is the fear? Where are the heroes? If not now, when?
- Dan Brown
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
Hey baby, when I write, I'm the hero of my shit.
- Charles Bukowski
Juno: "The heroes of olympus must unite! After your victory over kronos in manhattan...well I fear that wounded jupiter's self-esteem."
Percy: Cause I was right and he was wrong"
Juno: "He should be used to that after being married to me so long, but alas.
- Rick Riordan
Perseus, you are not the hero.
- Rick Riordan
A Half-Blood of the eldest gods, Shall reach sixteen against all odds
And see the world in endless sleep
The Hero's soul, cursed blade shall reap
A single choice shall end his days
Olympus to preserve or raze.
- Rick Riordan
No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially - those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call 'hard but necessary steps' for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story.
- Jim Butcher
The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.
- John Cage
They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things or people. They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting, fucking, drinking, art - poetry for intense emotion, the music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended, bewitching ornament for one's person and possessions.
- Thomas Cahill
We have not even to risk the adventure alone for the hero's of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had though to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. And where we had though to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone we shall be with all the world.
- Joseph Campbell
How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.
- Joseph Campbell
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have one before us, the labyrinth is fully known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
- Joseph Campbell
For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us..
- Joseph Campbell
We have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomonation,
we shall find a God.
And where we had thought to slay another,
we shall slay ourselves.
And where we had thought to travel outward,
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone,
we shall be with all the world.
- Joseph Campbell
You are the Hero of your own Story.
- Joseph Campbell
This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.
- Angela Carter
The trouble with real life is that you don't know whether you're the hero or just some nice chap who gets bumped off in chapter five to show what a rotter the villain is without anyone minding too much.
- Sarah Caudwell
Joe is the hero and Sammy is the sidekick. That's how I feel about it.
- Michael Chabon
I'm not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they're wearing... I can always get a J. Crew catalogue... ...So spare me, if you please, the hero's 'sharply intelligent blue eyes' and 'outthrust determined chin'.
- Stephen King
After being Washington's aide for four years and becoming the hero of Yorktown, Hamilton was viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of his association with Tories.
- Ron Chernow
The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they want to.
This book is dedicated to those fine men.
- Terry Pratchett
They say that characters were engraven on the bathtub of king Tching-thang to this effect: 'renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.' I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages.
- Henry David Thoreau
The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.
- Henry David Thoreau
Morning brings back the heroic ages. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.
- Henry David Thoreau
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.
- Phil Cousineau
I won't move a muscle, I won't come out, I'll be quiet, I promise. Besides, I'm not the hero type.
- Shelly Crane
First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns.
- Robert Creeley
I wish I had more of the hero gene, but I don't think I'd be very good at playing one.
- Billy Crudup
What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?
- Michael Cunningham
I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.
- Michael Cunningham
The dynamic is extremely similar to Gremlins and the hero is very similar, plus the small town atmosphere. It really is in a way the third Gremlins movie.
- Joe Dante
In Trout's novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn't like it, and he says to her, 'I already know about human beings.
- Kurt Vonnegut
The principles of storytelling do not change. Going home. Coming of age. Sin and redemption. The hero. The journey, The power of love. They are hardwired into us, just like our taste buds process sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. Can a new voice come up with something startling and creative and unprecedented? Absolutely. Can they invent a fifth taste? No. No, they can't. Can they make it so we don't like sweet anymore? No, no they can't.
- Chris Dee
I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I've never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero's errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I've ever done.
- John Green
There are a lot of bad things out there. Things the Hounds of Heaven were
created to destroy." He trailed his finger down the side of my face. "I can't be the hero you want
me to be--at least not in that way. But you can, Grace. You don't have to become one of the dark
ones. You can fight it. You can turn this curse into a blessing. You can become the hero. You
can become truly divine.
- Bree Despain
I am convinced that in the upcoming chapter of the struggle, I can be more useful to the inevitable change that will soon come to Cuba, to Cuba's freedom, as a private citizen dedicated to helping the heroes within Cuba.
- Lincoln Diazbalart
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
- Charles Dickens
As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.
- Joan Didion
Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.
- Benjamin Disraeli
One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal." Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about.
- Regina Doman
Well, it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths... The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy endings and all that... But the second kind, they show you life more like it is... The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up.
- Jennifer Donnelly
I did not make myself the heroine of my tales. Life appeared to me too common-place an affair as regarded myself. I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever by my lot; but I was not confided to my own identify, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age than my own sensations.
- Mary Shelley
I never know the heron as it flies at first. What is the slow, wide-winged figure in the sky? Then I see it, like a word in a foreign language, like seeing one's own name written in a strange alphabet and recognizing it, I say it: the heron.
- Ursula K Le Guin
The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.
- Henry Miller
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.
- Henry Miller
Every character I play has to be the hero of his own story, the way we're all heroes of our own lives.
- Jesse Eisenberg
It would not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at. The heroine of a modern novel is always "divinely tall," and she is ever "drawing herself up to her full height." At the "Barley Mow" she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this.
- Jerome K Jerome
Above all, be the heroine of your own life, not the victim.
- Nora Ephron
Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
- Nora Ephron
Well, there are conjoined twins in real life and we can tell a story about them so long as they're not the brunt of the jokes. In this, they're the heroes of this story; we love these guys.
- Bobby Farrelly
In the heroic effort of the handcart pioneers, we learn a great truth. All must pass through a refiner's fire, and the insignificant and unimportant in our lives can melt away like dross and make our faith bright, intact, and strong. There seems to be a full measure of anguish, sorrow, and often heartbreak for everyone, including those who earnestly seek to do right and be faithful. Yet this is part of the purging to become acquainted with God.
- James E Faust
Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.
- Garrison Keillor
The soldiers that didn't come back were the heroes. It's a roll of the dice. If a bullet has your name on it, you're a hero. If you hear a bullet go by, you're a survivor.
- Bob Feller
One blob of red in the wrong place and the audience isn't looking at the hero, they're looking at a patch of curtain (or something similar) and your whole effect is lost.
- Terence Fisher
This isn't a book you get out of the library and read on Saturday night, Gracie. In those books, the endings are happy, all the strings neatly tied in bows, and the hero and heroine's story is the one that counts. If we're the lead characters in this story, we're not doing a very good job of it because right now we're not the ones who matter most.
- Liz Flaherty
She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague "she" of all the poetry books.
- Gustave Flaubert
She remembered the heroines of novels she had read, and the lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. Now she saw herself as one of those amoureuses whom she had so envied: she was becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures; the long dream of her youth was coming true.
- Gustave Flaubert
Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
- Ian Fleming
History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
- Ian Fleming
In stories like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, they always say the heroine is 'as good as she is beautiful.' I wondered if people just wanted that to be true, wanted the beautiful to be good. I wondered if they wanted the ugly to be bad because then they wouldn't have to feel bad for them.
- Alex Flinn
But I do not do these things because we are family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom that the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom that the hero taught me.
- Jonathan Safran Foer
In my books, women often solve the problem. Even if the woman is not the hero, she's a strong character. She does change the plot. She'll often rescue the male character from some situation.
- Ken Follett
It really doesn't matter whether it's the villain or the hero. Sometimes the villain is the most colorful. But I prefer a part where you don't know what he is until the end.
- Glenn Ford
But see you, we should travel by night. Dark times for dark business, as they says. No sun to bother Valeriana or you, Kaylana's surely no' disadvantaged, and I know I work better in darkness. Anybody looking for us will have a harder time of it. Besides, marching in daylight is for the heroes. If we're going to do this, we may as well go all out.
- Eve Forward
If my life were a corny horror movie, and the heroine was lost and alone, trapped in an underwater cave, what would happen next? If you guessed, "She drops her flashlight, and it hits a rock and breaks, leaving her in utter darkness," you would be right. But I bet you didn't guess the part about an attack by a giant octopus.
- James Patterson
The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.
- Carlos Fuentes
He was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.
- Barack Obama
Most have been forgotten.
Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best.
The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both.
- George R R Martin
There's no shame in fear. But understand this - the coward is ruled by fear, while the hero rides it like a wild stallion.
- David Gemmell
I mean, I'm not going to play the hero of something.
- Paul Giamatti
It's not the heroes don't know fear, it's that they don't let fear stop them from doing the job.
- David Macinnis Gill
The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene
- Allen Ginsberg
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
One thing that most comic artists avoid is showing decisions. They show action, sure, and they show results, but they don't show (because it's difficult to show) the hero or the villain making a choice.
- Seth Godin
Our country, if you read the 'Federalist Papers,' is about disagreement. It's about pitting faction against faction, divided government, checks and balances. The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob - not the mob itself.
- Jonah Goldberg
I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.
- Ellen Goodman
As for suspense, I like to write books that draw you into the hero's plight from the opening pages, where people put their lives on the line for something - a belief, a family member, the truth.
- Andrew Gross
'Blind Curve,' the book I'm working on now, sprang from a crazy incident that happened to me last year while on my book tour. I was pulled out of my car for a minor traffic violation - an incident that escalated into my being thrown into cuffs and told I was going to jail. Except in my story, the hero doesn't get off as easily as I did.
- Andrew Gross
The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.
- Lev Grossman
Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
- Lev Grossman
Losing is like knowing that, in the movie scene where a thousand die but the hero lives, you're one of the obliterated.
- David Guterson
Don Quixote is one that comes to mind in comparison to mine, in that they both involve journeys undertaken by older men. That is unusual, because generally the hero of a journey story is very young.
- David Guterson
Marry Gentry Swallowing Darkness (Laurell K. Hamilton):Pick any fairy tale that's based on older stories, and the heroine of the piece has a miserable, dangerous, nightmarish time of it.
- Laurell K Hamilton
It's like what those cheesy action-movie heros always say before they finish taking out the bad guys: I started this, and I'm going to finish it. Except even in the movie of my own life, I've never been the heroine. I've never been Action Girl. I've only ever been Kristen's supporting character.
- Hannah Harrington
And you managed to leave the house and be the hero. Who do you think you are, Spider-Man?
- Kim Harrington
You are not one of the heroes in your fucking street operas," Dash shouts, his voice strangled. "You're not."
Verrel pauses and looks back. "And neither are you."
"I never bloody claimed to be.
- Cat Hellisen
His eyes are as green as a fresh pickled toad,
His hair is as dark as a blackboard.
I wish he was mine, he's really divine,
The hero who conquered the Dark Lord.
- J K Rowling
I think we all see ourselves as the heroes in our own lives.
- Tom Hiddleston
The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes. The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.
- James Hollis
The problem with 'the crown jewel of Chinese literature' [Dream of the Red Chamber] is that it has two thousand pages and an equal number of characters, and the hero is an effeminate ass who should have either been spanked or decapitated, both ends being equally objectionable.
- Barry Hughart
It is impossible to strive for the heroic life. The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
- Johan Huizinga
But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it, it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits in the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.
- Jean Paul Sartre
The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.
- Washington Irving
Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
- Walter Scott
Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.
- Penn Jillette
This book is cheerfully dedicated to those greatest and most heroic of all human endeavors, WAR and WARFARE; may they never cease to give us the pleasure, excitement and adrenal stimulation that we need, or provide us with the heroes, the presidents and leaders, the monuments and museums which we erect to them in the name of PEACE.
- James Jones
Love is the hero of all emotions. My love for you is a superhero, and it looks great hidden behind a mask.
- Jarod Kintz
I never go to movies where the hero's tits are bigger than the heroine's.
- Groucho Marx
I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.
- Elia Kazan
With any good story, you need the adversary, the heroes and villains. You need a good mixture to make it work.
- Phil Keoghan
Faster than the devil *times* Sharper than wind! That's the ultimate law of the hero!!
- Masashi Kishimoto
Romantic haste in drama brings
tears and sighs when the hero dies
but the curtain fall is final
when in life we take the tragic way
The sunset too is a glorious thing
but with it ends the day.
- C P Klapper
How DARE the villainous cads be as clever as the heroes.
- Mercedes Lackey
In 1979, Alien came out and Sigourney was in it with a bunch a guys. Nobody at that time expected the woman to be the hero, so that was a tradition that started.
- Sanaa Lathan
You would never expect a black woman to be the hero.
- Sanaa Lathan
We all like to believe that we'd be brave. We'd be the hero in the movie, the one who sacrifices himself to save others, the one who does the right thing when the world around him is wrong. In the movie the right choice is clear. And we leave the theater feeling good about ourselves because we can say, Me, I'd do the right thing. No one says, Me, I'd be the coward. Me, I'd rat out my neighbor to save myself. But that's what people do, mostly
- Jillian Lauren
The hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences.
- Teresa De Lauretis
The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers.
- Johann Kaspar Lavater
The basis of drama is... is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realizes that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilization and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. The example Aristotle uses, of course, is Oedipus.
- David Mamet
In any story, the villain is the catalyst. The hero's not a person who will bend the rules or show the cracks in his armor. He's one-dimensional intentionally, but the villain is the person who owns up to what he is and stands by it.
- Marilyn Manson
Emotion constricted Hawke's throat. He suddenly understood why the victims of concentration camps had walked quietly to the gas chambers. In the face of horror and insanity, it was the one human thing to do. Not the noble thing, not the heroic thingthe human thing. To live succumbing to the insanity, was the ultimate loss of pride.
- Karl Marlantes
In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.
- Alfred Marshall
What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don't really know, but I rather think he was going to be paralysed for life. Don't you?
- Daphne Du Maurier
We are the hero of our own story.
- Mary Mccarthy
We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
- Mary Mccarthy
The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
- Mary Mccarthy
So at the end of the day, here was what Mike was able to believe in: people.It was people and their kindness the made him feel blessed. It was people who were the heroes, and people who were generous, and people who comforted one another.
- Kaya Mclaren
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
- H L Mencken
It was depressing to realize that I wasn't the heroine anymore, that my story was over.
- Stephenie Meyer
What I want to bring back to superheroes with this project is a sense of play. Things have gotten so dreary. The heroes have gotten so ugly that even their muscles have muscles.
- Frank Miller
My feeling is that the hero has now been defined by phrases like the odious one that we were all raised with - crimes does not pay. Of course it pays, you schmuck. That's not why we don't do it. We don't do it because it is wrong.
- Frank Miller
We don't relate to her too much because you don't want the heroic character to not be heroic.
- Radha Mitchell
Because when I can believe in a villain, I can fear them. My pulse races, I worry about the heroes, I read through my fingers, and flinch when disaster strikes. I exhale my relief when all is well, and I really feel it when they fall in love. No matter how fantastic the world, how unique the magic that's written into it- I have to believe in the characters before I can believe in their gifts.
- Saundra Mitchell
I'm not the hero, Mac. Never have been. Never will be. Let us be perfectly clear: I'm not the antihero, either, so quit waiting to discover my hidden potential. There's nothing to redeem me.
- Karen Marie Moning
What happened to the days of the hero rescuing the damsel in distress?" Not that I could envisage Heather as a damsel in distress.
"Those days are long gone, Brendan. Nowadays, the damsel takes care of herself, and on occasion she might even rescue the hero, if she feels he deserves it."
"I'm screwed, then.
- Elizabeth Morgan
Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth. That is why the roles of the heroes and heroines of plays are given by the managers to the most youthful actors they can find among the competent.
- Booth Tarkington
Phoebe doesn't quite believe in fate the way I do. She says you have to chase your destiny, and she always expects life to be like a romantic comedy: all you have to do is dress the part of the heroine, and pretty soon you'll be kissing some hottie while fountains spew and music swells in the background.
- Lauren Morrill
The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
- Gilbert Murray
To look out the window, it might be the 1980s still, the height of the heroin plague, the police doing nothing, the politicians doing nothing. The same faces loitering in the forecourt of the boarded-up garage, proud of their intractability, the notoriety of their home. Wearing their failure like a badge of honour, generation after generation, parent and child.
- Paul Murray
In the meantime, how about us doing some more sister things together?"
Alys snorted. "Like what?"
Oh, I don't know. Slay a few monsters, outwit a few magicians, drain a few Chaotic Zones, negotiate a few treaties..."
And after lunch?"
Janie returned the wry grin sweetly. "I'll let you know."
The hero and the sorceress walked back up the path arm in arm.
- L J Smith
Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he's not our hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.
- Jonathan Nolan
Being an old radical, I like films like Spartacus. I could relate to the hero.
- Alex North
I grew up never seeing myself on-screen, and it's really important to me to give people who look like me a chance to see themselves. I want to see myself as the hero of any story. I want to see myself save the world from the bomb.
- Sandra Oh
The heroes of the present will retreat to the imitation they are anyhow.
- Charles Olson
These manly sentiments, in private life, make good citizens; in public life, the patriot and the hero.
- James Otis
The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.
- Orhan Pamuk
Faith is the heroism of the intellect.
- Charles Henry Parkhurst
First, how to memorialize the heroes of 9/11; second, something that expresses our resolve.
- George Pataki
The thing is, Iris, I've never liked the idea of compromise. In films and in stories people who love each other really love each other make horrendous sacrifices. They give kidneys they move across the world they die. Or become the undead because you know I like that sort of book. Basically the heroine's lover calls and she answers. Which is stupid. You know why "
Iris shook her head.
"Because he's always fucking calling.
- Nicole Peeler
But at the same time, the commonplace statement about them is true: every character is the hero of his own story. Each has a justification for his actions that is convincing to him. It's fun to give these people voices.
- Thomas Perry
I'm hardly physically right for the hero parts, now am I?
- Donald Pleasence
Sometimes in movies, I still have to be the hero, but it's not all that important to me anymore.
- Dennis Quaid
To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement.
- Raymond Queneau
You mustn't hit her over the head with it. Women like to be romanced like the heroines in the sensation novels." "What the devil do you know about sensation novels?" "A man can learn a great deal about women from novels," Matt said. "You should try it sometime.
- Amanda Quick
The heroes of Flight 93 won the first battle in the War on Terror, and they should never be forgotten.
- Jim Ramstad
Do not let the hero in your soul parish, in lonely frustration, for the life you deserved but never have been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
- Ayn Rand
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists. it is real. it is possible. it's yours.
- Ayn Rand
Go. Do what you have to do. Be the hero that you are ... but come back to me. There's more to Noah McCall than the head of Last Chance Rescue. I see that man.... I love them both. Return to me, Noah. Please. - Mara to Noah
- Christy Reece
The small lives of women don't make for good stories. That's why there were no girls in the stories Myrddin told, unless they were there as a prize for the hero to win at the end of his adventures.
- Philip Reeve
Heathcliff. The "hero" of Wuthering Heights. Although no one knows why.
He's mean, moody, and possibly a bit on the pongy side. Cathy loves him, though. She shows this by viciously rejecting him and marrying someone else for a laugh. Still, that is true love on the moors for you.
- Louise Rennison
Men, I thought, were more trouble than they were worth. Really, one should stick to books where one sees the hero coming a mile off.
- Eva Rice
Hard times don't create heroes. It is during the hard times when the 'hero' within us is revealed.
- Bob Riley
I didn't and don't want to be a 'feminine' version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.
- Joanna Russ
There's a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called 'funny animal scrolls' were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.
- Stan Sakai
Bill Thompson edited 'Whitechapel,' and his first question to me was, "Why in God's name do you want to bring down Superman?" And my answer was, and remains, by breaking down Holmes as this untouchable machine, it gives him the chance to become the hero we need him to be.
- Bernard Schaffer
You can't hang around waiting for somebody else to pull your strings. Destiny's what you make of it. You have to face whatever life throws at you. And if it throws more than you'd like, more than you think you can handle? Well then you just have to find the heroism within yourself and play out the hand you've been dealt. The universe never sets a challenge that can't be met. You just need to believe in yourself in order to find the strength to face it.
- Darren Shan
I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.
- Jeanette Winterson
- Heinrich Heine
The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.
- Lascelles Abercrombie
The Palestinian mother is the author of the survival story of the Palestinian people. She is the heroine, the one behind the success.
- Izzeldin Abuelaish
It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.
- John Adams
The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by.
- Felix Adler
It's hard to be the one always waiting. I mean, there's something to be said for the hero who charges off to battle, but when you get right down to it there's a whole story in who's left behind.
- Jodi Picoult
...I wanted to show that the mother was the heroine as soon as possible. I'm tired of love-sick girls and runaway wives. We'll prove that there's romance in old women also.
- Louisa May Alcott
The news of the open military help to Franco from Hitler and Mussolini, and the heroic resistance of the people of Madrid, Barcelona and the big cities fired a widespread wish to help the Republic and its people.
- Bill Alexander
Though Will was saying earlier," Tessa added, "that heroes all come to bad ends, and he could not imagine why anyone would want to be one, anyway."
"Ah." Jem's hand squeezed hers briefly, and then let it go. "Well, Will is looking at it from the hero's viewpoint, isn't he? But as for the rest of us, it's an easy answer."
"Is it?"
"Of course." His voice was almost a whisper now. "Heroes endure because we need them. Not for their own sakes. If Will ...
- Cassandra Clare
Because it's much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine.
- Woody Allen
I am the hero of Africa.
- Idi Amin
The essence of a tragedy, or even of a serious play, is the spiritual awakening, or regeneration, of the hero.
- Maxwell Anderson
It wasn't until we got over the self pity that we were able to accept suffering as apart of our life with Christ. A man or woman reaches this plane only when he or she ceases to be the hero.
- Corazon Aquino
The other thing is we have an incredible villain. And we worked very hard to have villains that are connected to the hero. They have an effect, an emotional effect. They never become out-of-this-world, crazy villains.
- Avi Arad
Well, it's like that myth about the hero. He made wings out of wax so he could fly, but when he got too close to the Sun, to God, the wax melted and he crashed to the ground
- Hiromu Arakawa
I used to get some flack from my agents because I wouldn't even audition for parts where the hero uses violent force to be a hero.
- Mackenzie Astin
If you are not the hero of your own story, then you're missing the whole point of your humanity.
- Steve Maraboli
If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?
- Jane Austen
To be disgraced in the eye of the world, to wear the appearance of infamy while her heart is all purity, her actions all innocence, and the misconduct of another the true source of her debasement, is one of those circumstances which peculiarly belong to the heroine's life, and her fortitude under it what particularly dignifies her character. Catherine had fortitude too; she suffered, but no mumur passed her lips.
- Jane Austen
I can't imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him.
- Julia Quinn
In the heroic effort of the individual to attain universality, in the attempt to transcend the curse of individuation and to become the one world-being, he suffers in his own person the primordial contradiction that is concealed in things, which means that he commits sacrilege and suffers.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Everything in proximity to the hero becomes tragedy; everything in proximity to the demigod becomes satyr-play; and everything in proximity to God becomes...what? "world" perhaps?
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.
- Natalie Clifford Barney
All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged -- after all, what's good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it's a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot.
- Mary Ann Shaffer
It is very difficult to be a hero without an audience, although, in a sense, we are each the hero of a peculiar, half-ruined film called our life.
- Sebastian Barry
Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.
- John Barth
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.
- Ingrid Bergman
Each one of us has the power and must develop the will to be the hero of his own life. We believe in goals, in purposes, in achievement and in the joy of living.
- Andrew Bernstein
Nothing is given to man on earth - struggle is built into the nature of life, and conflict is possible - the hero is the man who lets no obstacle prevent him from pursuing the values he has chosen.
- Andrew Bernstein
Disdaining the heroic outfit, excitable in her methods, garrulous, episodical, shrill, she misled her lover much as she misled her aunt. He mistook her fertility for weakness. He supposed her "as clever as they make 'em," but no more, not realizing that she was penetrating to the depths of his soul, and approving of what she found there.
- E M Forster
Our film examines the heroism, courage and prowess of the Soviet submarine force in ways never seen before.
- Kathryn Bigelow
I just don't see myself as the heroine in my own narrative.
- Cate Blanchett
As you follow the escapades or the journey of the hero through a story, it evokes some kind of emotion in the viewers. The director's job is to make sure that the audience goes through the journey and has an emotional reaction.
- Don Bluth
Girls are 50% of the population. We deserve to represent 50% of the heroes.
- Tamora Pierce
One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.
- Alain De Botton
When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes with anxiety.
- Andrew Coyle Bradley
King Lear alone among these plays has a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure.
- Andrew Coyle Bradley
Faith isn't about logic, son," Haddek said. "Perhaps that's your problem. You cannot 'disprove' the things you study, any more than we can prove to you that the Hero will save us. We simply must believe it, and accept the things Preservation has taught us.
- Brandon Sanderson
Meanwhile, news has been leaked to the press that the Hero of Drummond Street will be pictured on the cover of a national magazine, nude.
- Lilian Jackson Braun
Power changes everything till it is difficult to say who are the heroes and who the villains.
- Libba Bray
A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.
- Aristide Briand
The heroes of faith in Hebrews 11... obeyed by faith... obedience is the pathway to holiness... no one will become holy apart from a life of faith. Faith enables us to claim the promises of God, but it also enables us to obey the commends of God.
- Jerry Bridges
Oh, this faithless world! Someone must deliver them. You. If not you, who? You have been saved for a reason. Show them the old demons. Remind them of their fear. Apathy is death. Without darkness, there is no light. Without evil, there is no good. Make them choose. Dark or light. Where is the fear? Where are the heroes? If not now, when?
- Dan Brown
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
Hey baby, when I write, I'm the hero of my shit.
- Charles Bukowski
Juno: "The heroes of olympus must unite! After your victory over kronos in manhattan...well I fear that wounded jupiter's self-esteem."
Percy: Cause I was right and he was wrong"
Juno: "He should be used to that after being married to me so long, but alas.
- Rick Riordan
Perseus, you are not the hero.
- Rick Riordan
A Half-Blood of the eldest gods, Shall reach sixteen against all odds
And see the world in endless sleep
The Hero's soul, cursed blade shall reap
A single choice shall end his days
Olympus to preserve or raze.
- Rick Riordan
No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially - those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call 'hard but necessary steps' for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story.
- Jim Butcher
The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.
- John Cage
They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things or people. They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting, fucking, drinking, art - poetry for intense emotion, the music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended, bewitching ornament for one's person and possessions.
- Thomas Cahill
We have not even to risk the adventure alone for the hero's of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had though to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. And where we had though to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone we shall be with all the world.
- Joseph Campbell
How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.
- Joseph Campbell
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have one before us, the labyrinth is fully known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
- Joseph Campbell
For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us..
- Joseph Campbell
We have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomonation,
we shall find a God.
And where we had thought to slay another,
we shall slay ourselves.
And where we had thought to travel outward,
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone,
we shall be with all the world.
- Joseph Campbell
You are the Hero of your own Story.
- Joseph Campbell
This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.
- Angela Carter
The trouble with real life is that you don't know whether you're the hero or just some nice chap who gets bumped off in chapter five to show what a rotter the villain is without anyone minding too much.
- Sarah Caudwell
Joe is the hero and Sammy is the sidekick. That's how I feel about it.
- Michael Chabon
I'm not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they're wearing... I can always get a J. Crew catalogue... ...So spare me, if you please, the hero's 'sharply intelligent blue eyes' and 'outthrust determined chin'.
- Stephen King
After being Washington's aide for four years and becoming the hero of Yorktown, Hamilton was viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of his association with Tories.
- Ron Chernow
The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they want to.
This book is dedicated to those fine men.
- Terry Pratchett
They say that characters were engraven on the bathtub of king Tching-thang to this effect: 'renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.' I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages.
- Henry David Thoreau
The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.
- Henry David Thoreau
Morning brings back the heroic ages. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.
- Henry David Thoreau
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.
- Phil Cousineau
I won't move a muscle, I won't come out, I'll be quiet, I promise. Besides, I'm not the hero type.
- Shelly Crane
First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns.
- Robert Creeley
I wish I had more of the hero gene, but I don't think I'd be very good at playing one.
- Billy Crudup
What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?
- Michael Cunningham
I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.
- Michael Cunningham
The dynamic is extremely similar to Gremlins and the hero is very similar, plus the small town atmosphere. It really is in a way the third Gremlins movie.
- Joe Dante
In Trout's novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn't like it, and he says to her, 'I already know about human beings.
- Kurt Vonnegut
The principles of storytelling do not change. Going home. Coming of age. Sin and redemption. The hero. The journey, The power of love. They are hardwired into us, just like our taste buds process sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. Can a new voice come up with something startling and creative and unprecedented? Absolutely. Can they invent a fifth taste? No. No, they can't. Can they make it so we don't like sweet anymore? No, no they can't.
- Chris Dee
I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I've never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero's errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I've ever done.
- John Green
There are a lot of bad things out there. Things the Hounds of Heaven were
created to destroy." He trailed his finger down the side of my face. "I can't be the hero you want
me to be--at least not in that way. But you can, Grace. You don't have to become one of the dark
ones. You can fight it. You can turn this curse into a blessing. You can become the hero. You
can become truly divine.
- Bree Despain
I am convinced that in the upcoming chapter of the struggle, I can be more useful to the inevitable change that will soon come to Cuba, to Cuba's freedom, as a private citizen dedicated to helping the heroes within Cuba.
- Lincoln Diazbalart
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
- Charles Dickens
As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.
- Joan Didion
Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.
- Benjamin Disraeli
One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal." Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about.
- Regina Doman
Well, it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths... The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy endings and all that... But the second kind, they show you life more like it is... The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up.
- Jennifer Donnelly
I did not make myself the heroine of my tales. Life appeared to me too common-place an affair as regarded myself. I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever by my lot; but I was not confided to my own identify, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age than my own sensations.
- Mary Shelley
I never know the heron as it flies at first. What is the slow, wide-winged figure in the sky? Then I see it, like a word in a foreign language, like seeing one's own name written in a strange alphabet and recognizing it, I say it: the heron.
- Ursula K Le Guin
The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.
- Henry Miller
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.
- Henry Miller
Every character I play has to be the hero of his own story, the way we're all heroes of our own lives.
- Jesse Eisenberg
It would not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at. The heroine of a modern novel is always "divinely tall," and she is ever "drawing herself up to her full height." At the "Barley Mow" she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this.
- Jerome K Jerome
Above all, be the heroine of your own life, not the victim.
- Nora Ephron
Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
- Nora Ephron
Well, there are conjoined twins in real life and we can tell a story about them so long as they're not the brunt of the jokes. In this, they're the heroes of this story; we love these guys.
- Bobby Farrelly
In the heroic effort of the handcart pioneers, we learn a great truth. All must pass through a refiner's fire, and the insignificant and unimportant in our lives can melt away like dross and make our faith bright, intact, and strong. There seems to be a full measure of anguish, sorrow, and often heartbreak for everyone, including those who earnestly seek to do right and be faithful. Yet this is part of the purging to become acquainted with God.
- James E Faust
Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.
- Garrison Keillor
The soldiers that didn't come back were the heroes. It's a roll of the dice. If a bullet has your name on it, you're a hero. If you hear a bullet go by, you're a survivor.
- Bob Feller
One blob of red in the wrong place and the audience isn't looking at the hero, they're looking at a patch of curtain (or something similar) and your whole effect is lost.
- Terence Fisher
This isn't a book you get out of the library and read on Saturday night, Gracie. In those books, the endings are happy, all the strings neatly tied in bows, and the hero and heroine's story is the one that counts. If we're the lead characters in this story, we're not doing a very good job of it because right now we're not the ones who matter most.
- Liz Flaherty
She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague "she" of all the poetry books.
- Gustave Flaubert
She remembered the heroines of novels she had read, and the lyrical legion of those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. Now she saw herself as one of those amoureuses whom she had so envied: she was becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures; the long dream of her youth was coming true.
- Gustave Flaubert
Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
- Ian Fleming
History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
- Ian Fleming
In stories like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, they always say the heroine is 'as good as she is beautiful.' I wondered if people just wanted that to be true, wanted the beautiful to be good. I wondered if they wanted the ugly to be bad because then they wouldn't have to feel bad for them.
- Alex Flinn
But I do not do these things because we are family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom that the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom that the hero taught me.
- Jonathan Safran Foer
In my books, women often solve the problem. Even if the woman is not the hero, she's a strong character. She does change the plot. She'll often rescue the male character from some situation.
- Ken Follett
It really doesn't matter whether it's the villain or the hero. Sometimes the villain is the most colorful. But I prefer a part where you don't know what he is until the end.
- Glenn Ford
But see you, we should travel by night. Dark times for dark business, as they says. No sun to bother Valeriana or you, Kaylana's surely no' disadvantaged, and I know I work better in darkness. Anybody looking for us will have a harder time of it. Besides, marching in daylight is for the heroes. If we're going to do this, we may as well go all out.
- Eve Forward
If my life were a corny horror movie, and the heroine was lost and alone, trapped in an underwater cave, what would happen next? If you guessed, "She drops her flashlight, and it hits a rock and breaks, leaving her in utter darkness," you would be right. But I bet you didn't guess the part about an attack by a giant octopus.
- James Patterson
The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.
- Carlos Fuentes
He was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.
- Barack Obama
Most have been forgotten.
Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best.
The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both.
- George R R Martin
There's no shame in fear. But understand this - the coward is ruled by fear, while the hero rides it like a wild stallion.
- David Gemmell
I mean, I'm not going to play the hero of something.
- Paul Giamatti
It's not the heroes don't know fear, it's that they don't let fear stop them from doing the job.
- David Macinnis Gill
The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene
- Allen Ginsberg
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
One thing that most comic artists avoid is showing decisions. They show action, sure, and they show results, but they don't show (because it's difficult to show) the hero or the villain making a choice.
- Seth Godin
Our country, if you read the 'Federalist Papers,' is about disagreement. It's about pitting faction against faction, divided government, checks and balances. The hero in American political tradition is the man who stands up to the mob - not the mob itself.
- Jonah Goldberg
I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.
- Ellen Goodman
As for suspense, I like to write books that draw you into the hero's plight from the opening pages, where people put their lives on the line for something - a belief, a family member, the truth.
- Andrew Gross
'Blind Curve,' the book I'm working on now, sprang from a crazy incident that happened to me last year while on my book tour. I was pulled out of my car for a minor traffic violation - an incident that escalated into my being thrown into cuffs and told I was going to jail. Except in my story, the hero doesn't get off as easily as I did.
- Andrew Gross
The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.
- Lev Grossman
Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.
- Lev Grossman
Losing is like knowing that, in the movie scene where a thousand die but the hero lives, you're one of the obliterated.
- David Guterson
Don Quixote is one that comes to mind in comparison to mine, in that they both involve journeys undertaken by older men. That is unusual, because generally the hero of a journey story is very young.
- David Guterson
Marry Gentry Swallowing Darkness (Laurell K. Hamilton):Pick any fairy tale that's based on older stories, and the heroine of the piece has a miserable, dangerous, nightmarish time of it.
- Laurell K Hamilton
It's like what those cheesy action-movie heros always say before they finish taking out the bad guys: I started this, and I'm going to finish it. Except even in the movie of my own life, I've never been the heroine. I've never been Action Girl. I've only ever been Kristen's supporting character.
- Hannah Harrington
And you managed to leave the house and be the hero. Who do you think you are, Spider-Man?
- Kim Harrington
You are not one of the heroes in your fucking street operas," Dash shouts, his voice strangled. "You're not."
Verrel pauses and looks back. "And neither are you."
"I never bloody claimed to be.
- Cat Hellisen
His eyes are as green as a fresh pickled toad,
His hair is as dark as a blackboard.
I wish he was mine, he's really divine,
The hero who conquered the Dark Lord.
- J K Rowling
I think we all see ourselves as the heroes in our own lives.
- Tom Hiddleston
The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes. The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.
- James Hollis
The problem with 'the crown jewel of Chinese literature' [Dream of the Red Chamber] is that it has two thousand pages and an equal number of characters, and the hero is an effeminate ass who should have either been spanked or decapitated, both ends being equally objectionable.
- Barry Hughart
It is impossible to strive for the heroic life. The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
- Johan Huizinga
But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it, it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits in the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.
- Jean Paul Sartre
The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.
- Washington Irving
Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
- Walter Scott
Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.
- Penn Jillette
This book is cheerfully dedicated to those greatest and most heroic of all human endeavors, WAR and WARFARE; may they never cease to give us the pleasure, excitement and adrenal stimulation that we need, or provide us with the heroes, the presidents and leaders, the monuments and museums which we erect to them in the name of PEACE.
- James Jones
Love is the hero of all emotions. My love for you is a superhero, and it looks great hidden behind a mask.
- Jarod Kintz
I never go to movies where the hero's tits are bigger than the heroine's.
- Groucho Marx
I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.
- Elia Kazan
With any good story, you need the adversary, the heroes and villains. You need a good mixture to make it work.
- Phil Keoghan
Faster than the devil *times* Sharper than wind! That's the ultimate law of the hero!!
- Masashi Kishimoto
Romantic haste in drama brings
tears and sighs when the hero dies
but the curtain fall is final
when in life we take the tragic way
The sunset too is a glorious thing
but with it ends the day.
- C P Klapper
How DARE the villainous cads be as clever as the heroes.
- Mercedes Lackey
In 1979, Alien came out and Sigourney was in it with a bunch a guys. Nobody at that time expected the woman to be the hero, so that was a tradition that started.
- Sanaa Lathan
You would never expect a black woman to be the hero.
- Sanaa Lathan
We all like to believe that we'd be brave. We'd be the hero in the movie, the one who sacrifices himself to save others, the one who does the right thing when the world around him is wrong. In the movie the right choice is clear. And we leave the theater feeling good about ourselves because we can say, Me, I'd do the right thing. No one says, Me, I'd be the coward. Me, I'd rat out my neighbor to save myself. But that's what people do, mostly
- Jillian Lauren
The hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences.
- Teresa De Lauretis
The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers.
- Johann Kaspar Lavater
The basis of drama is... is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realizes that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilization and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. The example Aristotle uses, of course, is Oedipus.
- David Mamet
In any story, the villain is the catalyst. The hero's not a person who will bend the rules or show the cracks in his armor. He's one-dimensional intentionally, but the villain is the person who owns up to what he is and stands by it.
- Marilyn Manson
Emotion constricted Hawke's throat. He suddenly understood why the victims of concentration camps had walked quietly to the gas chambers. In the face of horror and insanity, it was the one human thing to do. Not the noble thing, not the heroic thingthe human thing. To live succumbing to the insanity, was the ultimate loss of pride.
- Karl Marlantes
In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.
- Alfred Marshall
What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don't really know, but I rather think he was going to be paralysed for life. Don't you?
- Daphne Du Maurier
We are the hero of our own story.
- Mary Mccarthy
We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
- Mary Mccarthy
The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
- Mary Mccarthy
So at the end of the day, here was what Mike was able to believe in: people.It was people and their kindness the made him feel blessed. It was people who were the heroes, and people who were generous, and people who comforted one another.
- Kaya Mclaren
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
- H L Mencken
It was depressing to realize that I wasn't the heroine anymore, that my story was over.
- Stephenie Meyer
What I want to bring back to superheroes with this project is a sense of play. Things have gotten so dreary. The heroes have gotten so ugly that even their muscles have muscles.
- Frank Miller
My feeling is that the hero has now been defined by phrases like the odious one that we were all raised with - crimes does not pay. Of course it pays, you schmuck. That's not why we don't do it. We don't do it because it is wrong.
- Frank Miller
We don't relate to her too much because you don't want the heroic character to not be heroic.
- Radha Mitchell
Because when I can believe in a villain, I can fear them. My pulse races, I worry about the heroes, I read through my fingers, and flinch when disaster strikes. I exhale my relief when all is well, and I really feel it when they fall in love. No matter how fantastic the world, how unique the magic that's written into it- I have to believe in the characters before I can believe in their gifts.
- Saundra Mitchell
I'm not the hero, Mac. Never have been. Never will be. Let us be perfectly clear: I'm not the antihero, either, so quit waiting to discover my hidden potential. There's nothing to redeem me.
- Karen Marie Moning
What happened to the days of the hero rescuing the damsel in distress?" Not that I could envisage Heather as a damsel in distress.
"Those days are long gone, Brendan. Nowadays, the damsel takes care of herself, and on occasion she might even rescue the hero, if she feels he deserves it."
"I'm screwed, then.
- Elizabeth Morgan
Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth. That is why the roles of the heroes and heroines of plays are given by the managers to the most youthful actors they can find among the competent.
- Booth Tarkington
Phoebe doesn't quite believe in fate the way I do. She says you have to chase your destiny, and she always expects life to be like a romantic comedy: all you have to do is dress the part of the heroine, and pretty soon you'll be kissing some hottie while fountains spew and music swells in the background.
- Lauren Morrill
The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
- Gilbert Murray
To look out the window, it might be the 1980s still, the height of the heroin plague, the police doing nothing, the politicians doing nothing. The same faces loitering in the forecourt of the boarded-up garage, proud of their intractability, the notoriety of their home. Wearing their failure like a badge of honour, generation after generation, parent and child.
- Paul Murray
In the meantime, how about us doing some more sister things together?"
Alys snorted. "Like what?"
Oh, I don't know. Slay a few monsters, outwit a few magicians, drain a few Chaotic Zones, negotiate a few treaties..."
And after lunch?"
Janie returned the wry grin sweetly. "I'll let you know."
The hero and the sorceress walked back up the path arm in arm.
- L J Smith
Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he's not our hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.
- Jonathan Nolan
Being an old radical, I like films like Spartacus. I could relate to the hero.
- Alex North
I grew up never seeing myself on-screen, and it's really important to me to give people who look like me a chance to see themselves. I want to see myself as the hero of any story. I want to see myself save the world from the bomb.
- Sandra Oh
The heroes of the present will retreat to the imitation they are anyhow.
- Charles Olson
These manly sentiments, in private life, make good citizens; in public life, the patriot and the hero.
- James Otis
The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.
- Orhan Pamuk
Faith is the heroism of the intellect.
- Charles Henry Parkhurst
First, how to memorialize the heroes of 9/11; second, something that expresses our resolve.
- George Pataki
The thing is, Iris, I've never liked the idea of compromise. In films and in stories people who love each other really love each other make horrendous sacrifices. They give kidneys they move across the world they die. Or become the undead because you know I like that sort of book. Basically the heroine's lover calls and she answers. Which is stupid. You know why "
Iris shook her head.
"Because he's always fucking calling.
- Nicole Peeler
But at the same time, the commonplace statement about them is true: every character is the hero of his own story. Each has a justification for his actions that is convincing to him. It's fun to give these people voices.
- Thomas Perry
I'm hardly physically right for the hero parts, now am I?
- Donald Pleasence
Sometimes in movies, I still have to be the hero, but it's not all that important to me anymore.
- Dennis Quaid
To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement.
- Raymond Queneau
You mustn't hit her over the head with it. Women like to be romanced like the heroines in the sensation novels." "What the devil do you know about sensation novels?" "A man can learn a great deal about women from novels," Matt said. "You should try it sometime.
- Amanda Quick
The heroes of Flight 93 won the first battle in the War on Terror, and they should never be forgotten.
- Jim Ramstad
Do not let the hero in your soul parish, in lonely frustration, for the life you deserved but never have been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
- Ayn Rand
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists. it is real. it is possible. it's yours.
- Ayn Rand
Go. Do what you have to do. Be the hero that you are ... but come back to me. There's more to Noah McCall than the head of Last Chance Rescue. I see that man.... I love them both. Return to me, Noah. Please. - Mara to Noah
- Christy Reece
The small lives of women don't make for good stories. That's why there were no girls in the stories Myrddin told, unless they were there as a prize for the hero to win at the end of his adventures.
- Philip Reeve
Heathcliff. The "hero" of Wuthering Heights. Although no one knows why.
He's mean, moody, and possibly a bit on the pongy side. Cathy loves him, though. She shows this by viciously rejecting him and marrying someone else for a laugh. Still, that is true love on the moors for you.
- Louise Rennison
Men, I thought, were more trouble than they were worth. Really, one should stick to books where one sees the hero coming a mile off.
- Eva Rice
Hard times don't create heroes. It is during the hard times when the 'hero' within us is revealed.
- Bob Riley
I didn't and don't want to be a 'feminine' version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.
- Joanna Russ
There's a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called 'funny animal scrolls' were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.
- Stan Sakai
Bill Thompson edited 'Whitechapel,' and his first question to me was, "Why in God's name do you want to bring down Superman?" And my answer was, and remains, by breaking down Holmes as this untouchable machine, it gives him the chance to become the hero we need him to be.
- Bernard Schaffer
You can't hang around waiting for somebody else to pull your strings. Destiny's what you make of it. You have to face whatever life throws at you. And if it throws more than you'd like, more than you think you can handle? Well then you just have to find the heroism within yourself and play out the hand you've been dealt. The universe never sets a challenge that can't be met. You just need to believe in yourself in order to find the strength to face it.
- Darren Shan
I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.
- Jeanette Winterson
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