Top 250 Mackenzi Lee Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 6

101. “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

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

— Mackenzi Lee

103. “I’ve always been of the mind that subtlety is a waste of time. Fortune favors the flirtatious.”

— Mackenzi Lee

104. “My head’s higher than his, but we’re close enough that I can see the freckles beneath his eyes. If I had to pick a favorite part of Percy’s face – which would be impossible, really, but if held at gunpoint and forced to make a selection – it would be that small star-map across his skin. A part of him it feels as though no one else but me is ever close enough to see.”

— Mackenzi Lee

105. “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

106. “Perhaps we all said the right things at the wrong time; perhaps we couldn’t help it. Perhaps words became too heavy to haul, and the moment we let them loose was always the wrong one, but they needed to be free.”

— Mackenzi Lee

107. “I mean, it feels as though if I don’t devote my attention to whatever fake scenario I’ve come up with, then I won’t be ready when it happens.”

— Mackenzi Lee

108. “And Percy is right there beside me on that beautiful, glowing street and he is just as beautiful and glowing as it is. The stars dust gold leafing on his skin. And we are looking at each other, just looking, and I swear there are whole lifetimes lived in those small, shared seconds.”

— Mackenzi Lee

109. “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

110. “I want to stop picking at life like it’s a meal I don’t want to eat, because I want to. I want to taste it all. I want life to be a feast, even if I have to eat it raw and bloody and burned some days. I will pick bones from my teeth. I will let the juice drip down my chin.”

— Mackenzi Lee

111. “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

112. “Of course, the moment I get around other females my own age, I end up socializing with the dog.”

— Mackenzi Lee

113. “I feel strange suddenly, the old itch of fear that I am a feral girl in a domesticated world, watched by everybody with pity and concern.”

— Mackenzi Lee

114. “And then he leaves us to our own devices beside a store of gunpowder and flint and a cannon, thereby solidifying our captors’ reputation as the worst pirates in the history of the Mediterranean.”

— Mackenzi Lee

115. “You’re either good, or you’re clever.”

— Mackenzi Lee

116. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He clenches his hands into fists around the blankets, face set, then says, “Fine, you want to know why? Because at the end of this year, I’m not going to law school, I’m going into an asylum.”

— Mackenzi Lee

117. “The bricks tear at my coat like briars as I pull his hips to mine so I can feel him going stiff.”

— Mackenzi Lee

118. “I’d rather not be glimpsed by men. Perhaps we can set up some sort of trap so that they fall off a cliff if they try to pluck me from the ground.”

— Mackenzi Lee

119. “Shout at me,” I want to tell him. “Fight back, because I deserve it.” I deserve to be fed all the ways I’ve made him feel unwanted, slapped with my own selfishness. But he’s Percy, so he doesn’t say another cruel word. Even at his worst, he’s so much better than me.”

— Mackenzi Lee

120. “I think I’m going to have worse than revising scripture to answer for when He and I meet.”

— Mackenzi Lee

121. “A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I’m left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.”

— Mackenzi Lee

122. “From my first sighting, I fall in immediate and passionate love with Venice.”

— Mackenzi Lee

123. “Someday, you little twat, I’d tell him, it’s going to be more. It’s going to be better, and so will you. Where we start doesn’t have to be where we end up.”

— Mackenzi Lee

124. “Why do people assume I know more than I do? I’m an idiot about most things.”

— Mackenzi Lee

125. “Perfecting my phrasing without betraying my heart is starting to feel like a complicated dance.”

— Mackenzi Lee

126. “One of my maids found a pair of your breeches in the harpsichord this morning. I believe they were the same ones you left the house in last night.”

— Mackenzi Lee

127. “I don’t think I have to be well to be happy.”

— Mackenzi Lee

128. “How long can a man live with his own mind against him?”

— Mackenzi Lee

129. “I have become a veritable scholar in seemingly innocent ploys to get his skin against mine.”

— Mackenzi Lee

130. “I want to touch him abso-bloody-lutely evrywhere.”

— Mackenzi Lee

131. “Girls like me are meant to have books instead of friends.”

— Mackenzi Lee

132. “Anyone who says they enjoy my writing is clearly either lying or has terrible taste.”

— Mackenzi Lee

133. “I let out a shy laugh, flit my eyes down to the floor, then back to him through my lashes. His neck goes a little red. Fan-bloody-tastic.”

— Mackenzi Lee

134. “What I meant is that I sometimes feel as though everyone around me is trying so hard to be complicated and coy all the time, but you’re so sincere in everything. You make me remember people can mean what they say.”

— Mackenzi Lee

135. “Charm has never been a flower that blooms in your garden, has it?”

— Mackenzi Lee

136. “If the Good Lord didn’t want men to play with themselves, we’d have hooks for hands.”

— Mackenzi Lee

137. “Between the near-kiss with Percy and now goddamned pirates, my heart is certainly being put through its paces today.”

— Mackenzi Lee

138. “The truth is that Percy has always been important to me, long before I fell so hard for him there was an audible crash. It’s only lately that his knee bumping mine under a narrow pub table leaves me fumbling for words. A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I’m left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.”

— Mackenzi Lee

139. “Well, one is illegal. And a sin. And the other is also a sin, if you aren’t married to her.”

— Mackenzi Lee

140. “That’s the lie of it all. You have to be better to prove yourself worthy of being equal.”

— Mackenzi Lee

141. “You took my life and Oliver’s life and made them into this book. You made us into monsters, both of us.”

— Mackenzi Lee

142. “I want to take the raw ore I have been given and forge it into a blade. I want to be brave enough to think I can do any of that. To believe that is a life I deserve.”

— Mackenzi Lee

143. “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

144. “It had felt like the first deep breath I’d ever taken, to tell him everything, to hear his half of it all, then hold them up together to find they fit like two pieces of cracked pottery.”

— Mackenzi Lee

145. “It’s an approximation of looking presentable, though he still looks less like a gentleman and more like the raw ore mined to create one.”

— Mackenzi Lee

146. “So, everything seemed to be going great in Christina’s court, where “Single Ladies” played on repeat and there were free JSTOR credentials for all.”

— Mackenzi Lee

147. “What do you want me to say? Yes, I’m ill. I’m an epileptic – that’s my lot. It isn’t easy and it isn’t very enjoyable but this is what I’ve got to live with. This is who I am, and I don’t think I’m insane. I don’t think I should be locked up and I don’t think I need to be cured of it for my life to be good. But no one seems to agree with me on that, and I was hoping you’d be different, but apparently you think just the same as my family and my doctors and everyone else.”

— Mackenzi Lee

148. “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

149. “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

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

— Mackenzi Lee