Top 250 Mackenzi Lee Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “And thank God, because I don’t want simple. I do not want easy or small or uncomplicated. I want my life to be messy and ugly and wicked and wild, and I want to feel it all.”

— Mackenzi Lee

102. “Blackmail is aggravating in normal circumstances, but far worse when it’s coming from a younger sister.”

— Mackenzi Lee

103. “Our best is all we can do, and all we can hold on to is each other. And, zounds, that is more than enough.”

— Mackenzi Lee

104. “Because women don’t have to be men’s equals to be considered contenders; they have to be better. That’s the lie of it all. You have to be better to prove yourself worthy of being equal.”

— Mackenzi Lee

105. “And it’s going to be a disaster. But that’s all right, because we’ll have each other, and there’s no one on this goddamn planet I’d rather be a disaster with than you.”

— Mackenzi Lee

106. “Maybe I was panicking. Maybe I am. Because give it a year. Or ten years. Or a life. Because I just don’t think I can do it, Perce. I don’t think I’m enough for you. And I don’t want you to do this big thing – give me this big part of yourself – just to turn around and realize you made a mistake.”

— Mackenzi Lee

107. “Pain and ecstasy live close-knit in my heart.”

— Mackenzi Lee

108. “There is nothing good about watching another man claim your ship because your skin is too dark to do it yourself,” he says, each word a glancing wound. “So in future, you needn’t demand apologies on my behalf.”

— Mackenzi Lee

109. “Let’s get one thing straight,” I interrupt, jerking my arm out of his grip with such force that I nearly knock out the woman standing behind me. “You are not my father, I am not your responsibility, and I did not come here to have a list of my faults related from him or be condemned for who I associate with-not by you or that damned duke. So while it’s been a jolly good time, being treated like a child all evening, I think I’ve just about had enough and I can make my own way from here.”

— Mackenzi Lee

110. “Of course he has! I want to shout. He’s Dr. Alexander Platt, and I have excellent taste in idols!”

— Mackenzi Lee

111. “You’re hopeless,” he says, and it is so strange and horrible and utterly lovely how the way that he’s looking at me makes me want to both back away and throw myself upon him. It hurts like a sudden light striking your eyes in the dead of night.”

— Mackenzi Lee

112. “If you weren’t here, everything would be the worst.”

— Mackenzi Lee

113. “I wish I could travel backward in time and tell Monty of two years ago, lying on the lawn of his father’s house with a black eye and a dawning realization he was falling in love with his best friend, that someday he’d be here.”

— Mackenzi Lee

114. “It is so much easier to give into them than to try and fight them off. It’s a relief, like letting go the lead of a dog that’s been wrenching your shoulder with the force of its pulling. But now I have a dog to chase, and I’m running in circles after every catastrophic scenario, struggling to breathe.”

— Mackenzi Lee

115. “You can’t make people the way you want them to be, Alasdair. Sometimes you just have to love them how they are.”

— Mackenzi Lee

116. “I want to sleep, I think. I want to stop struggling and give in. I want to let the water take me and never have to be in my own company again. I want to stop dragging myself around, stop feeling the weight of every thought like they’re stones pulling me farther and farther under, the seafloor and surface both out of sight. I want to stop feeling weak just because some days, I can hardly carry my heavy heart.”

— Mackenzi Lee

117. “Her mouth twisted into a sly smile. “How disappointing. A pretty girl’s about the only thing that would keep me in a shithole like Geneva.”

— Mackenzi Lee

118. “The important bit was that if you go behind my back, I swear to God, I’ll skin you alive – ” “I won’t – ” “ – murder you, then alchemically raise you from the dead so I can murder you again –.”

— Mackenzi Lee

119. “I want to be the only thing touching him. I want to be the only thing that ever touches him again. I will be envious of every shirt he ever wears, the cuffs of his coats, the trousers going soft with wear where they rub his inner thighs.”

— Mackenzi Lee

120. “But I am a wildflower and will stand against the gales.”

— Mackenzi Lee

121. “He seems like he wants to touch me, but we’ve both lost any sense of how men who haven’t kissed each other do that. He finally taps my knee, open-palmed and short, the way we used to try and hold our hands to candle flames without being burned when we were boys, and I wonder if there will ever again be a day when it doesn’t feel as though he might fly to pieces between my hands.”

— Mackenzi Lee

122. “For a woman who boasts that she doesn’t give a fig what anyone thinks of her, I certainly have a lot of party-related anxiety.”

— Mackenzi Lee

123. “I make a snatch for Percy’s hand, and he laces his fingers with mine and gives them a squeeze. Fetch me a couch, for I nearly swoon.”

— Mackenzi Lee

124. “You might be the only person left on earth who thinks me decent.”

— Mackenzi Lee

125. “Say something, Monty. Be a friend, be a gentleman, be a human being. It’s Percy, your best friend, Percy who you’ve gotten foxed with, who plays you his violin, who used to spit apple seeds at you from high up in the orchard treetops. Percy who you kissed in Paris, who looks so damn beautiful, even now. Say something kind. Something that will make him stop looking so alone and afraid.”

— Mackenzi Lee

126. “I should have known I wasn’t a forest fire, but a small flame that could be snuffed out easily by the first man who turned my way with a heavy breath.”

— Mackenzi Lee

127. “I have spent so long building up my fortress and learning to tend it all myself, because if I didn’t feel I needed anyone, then I wouldn’t miss them if they weren’t there. I couldn’t be neglected if I was everything to myself.”

— Mackenzi Lee

128. “Every chink and rut and battering wind has made is tough and brave and impossible to strike down.”

— Mackenzi Lee

129. “Maybe everyone has hunger like this – impossible, insatiable, but all-consuming in spite of it all. Maybe the desert dreams of spilling rivers, valleys of a view. Maybe that hunger will one day pass. But if it does, I will be left shelled and halved and hollowed.”

— Mackenzi Lee

130. “Returning to a place you once knew as well as your own shadow isn’t the same as never leaving at all.”

— Mackenzi Lee

131. “And I begin to cry. Though cry seems far too gentle a word. I begin to abso-bloody-lutely sob. Felicity is kind enough to look away. Percy is kind enough not to.”

— Mackenzi Lee

132. “Ladies haven’t the luxury of being squeamish about blood,” she replies, and Percy and I go fantastically red in unison.”

— Mackenzi Lee

133. “But you seem very bright. Or if not bright, you’re at least confident. And often people can’t tell those two things apart.”

— Mackenzi Lee

134. “Then maybe I should have said it to you sooner – you needn’t hide around us. I’m sorry you ever felt you had to. And that the world makes you feel as though you have to.”

— Mackenzi Lee

135. “But he was not his brother. Insolence would not be a sign of strength, but defiance. He and his brother may play the same game of his father’s devising, but the rules would never be the same. Darkness moves in a different way than the light. It is always there before the light. It has to be faster, and smarter, and stealthier.”

— Mackenzi Lee

136. “Love may be a grand thing, but goddamn if it doesn’t take up more than its fair share of space inside a man.”

— Mackenzi Lee

137. “Mythology is all shite anyway,′ she says. ‘It never has stories about people like us. I’d rather write my own legends, or be the story someone else looks to one day, build a strong foundation for those who follow us.”

— Mackenzi Lee

138. “Or rather, my idea. Both Felicity and Percy are giving me a look that clearly conveys it is I alone taking a machete to this jungle.”

— Mackenzi Lee

139. “How is my body more willing to die than take in air? Or release the fiction that there’s something wrong with me? I want to press my fingers into my ears and snuff out the noise. If only it were so easy.”

— Mackenzi Lee

140. “Do you know how horrid it feels to watch my brother get tossed out of the best boarding school of England, then get to travel the Continent as a reward, while I’m stuck behind, not permitted to study the same things or read the same books or even visit the same places while we’re abroad, just because I had the bad luck to be born a girl?”

— Mackenzi Lee

141. “Come on, you enormous wrinkle.”

— Mackenzi Lee

142. “It’s nice... ” Theo repeated, his thumb skimming the rim of his teacup. “To know that there’s somewhere out there in the cosmos where people like me don’t have to be afraid.”

— Mackenzi Lee

143. “Percy turns to me quickly, his eyes catching the light and reflecting a mischievous glint. I’m suddenly aware of my body in a way I wasn’t a moment before, every twitch and blink, the way my shoulders sit inside this too-big coat, the bob of my throat as I swallow hard, every point of my silhouette that his gaze touches. Love may be a grand thing, but goddamn if it doesn’t take up more than its fair share of space inside a man.”

— Mackenzi Lee

144. “In their poor imitation of French fashion, they look like pastries in a bakery window at the end of the day, trying a bit too hard to be beautiful as they wilt.”

— Mackenzi Lee

145. “The first step will be unlearning all the things you’ve taught me for my entire life.”

— Mackenzi Lee

146. “Perhaps fashion is just a reinforcement of a lady’s chastity, in hopes that the interested party may lose interest and abandon any deflowering attempts simply for all the clothing in the way.”

— Mackenzi Lee

147. “Reading in excess causes the female brain to shrink.”

— Mackenzi Lee

148. “I would rather have my eyes gouged out with sucket forks and fed back to me, but it seems best not to tell him so.”

— Mackenzi Lee

149. “I do not need reasons to exist. I do not need to justify the space I take up in this world.”

— Mackenzi Lee

150. “Though I would hang on because I’d likely wash up in France, and from what I remember from the summer my family spent there when Felicity and I were young, there are some lovely women in France. Some handsome boys as well, many of whom wear their breeches very tight, though I wasn’t clear where I stood on that when I was eleven.”

— Mackenzi Lee