“If he'd been a hero, he would have taken the opportunity to say, "That's what I call sorted!" Since he wasn't a hero, he threw up.”

“I knew I should have call Jack, should have told him...but I didn't. Not yet. I was afraid of him thinking that I was crazy, too. I wasn't sure what he'd do if he saw me drowning. I wasn't sure he'd save me unless he was saving himself. what he'd say.”

“A brick could be used to represent my hero. My hero obviously doesn’t look like a brick, but since he is my hero I decided to represent him as more handsome and interesting than he really is. Who’s my hero? Any member of Congress.”

“You're my hero," he murmured.She grinned up at him. "What a coincidence. You're _my_ hero.”

“No, Belle needed him. He had to save her from a disastrous marriage. And then, he supposed, he'd simply marry her himself.John wasn't unaware that he was about to pull one of the greatest about-faces in history. He could only hope that Belle would understand that he had realized she'd had been right all along. People made mistakes, didn't they? After all, he wasn't some infallible storybook hero.”

“...I thought he was the man I'd been waiting for. A hero right out of Austen. The one who would finally make everything okay. Only he wasn't real. Like Austen's characters, he was fiction. Mr. Darcy broke my heart.”