Top 250 Mackenzi Lee Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “When he speaks again, his tone is nearer to reverence, a voice for saints and sacred places.”

— Mackenzi Lee

152. “We feel like changeling versions of ourselves lying here, brittle likenesses doing a mimic of the way they have seen us behave before.”

— Mackenzi Lee

153. “I am thinking that my father lies, and maybe the foul things he’s fed me about myself for my whole bleeding life were just as untrue. That my father cheats. That my father has no pedestal from which to hand down judgment on me for my sins.”

— Mackenzi Lee

154. “I’ve always been of the mind that subtlety is a waste of time.”

— Mackenzi Lee

155. “This is a silence we’ve shared.”

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

157. “When Callum and I first met, I had been lonely enough to not only accept his employment, but also the companionship that came with it, which gave him the idea that men often get in their heads when a woman pays some kind of attention to them: that it was a sign I want him to smash his mouth – and possibly other body parts – against mine. Which I do not.”

— Mackenzi Lee

158. “Flanked as they are by busts of the governors before them and loomed over by all those names along the walls, I feel generations of men who have kept women from their schools staring me down. Men like this never die – they’re chiseled in marble and erected in these halls.”

— Mackenzi Lee

159. “He reaches out, almost as though he can’t help himself, and puts his thumb to my jawline. The tips of his fingers brush the hollow of my throat, and I feel the touch so deep I half expect that when he moves, I’ll be left with an imprint there, as though I am a thing fashioned from clay in a potter’s hands.”

— Mackenzi Lee

160. “And I wish in that moment that I were brave.”

— Mackenzi Lee

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “I’m learning there is no one way for life to be lived, no one way to be strong or brave or kind or good. Rather there are many people doing the best they can with the heart they are given and the hand they are dealt. Our best is all we can do, and all we can hold on to is each other.”

— Mackenzi Lee

166. “Somehow, letting our feelings out into the light had both eased so many of my fears and created an entirely new set that kept sleep at bay.”

— Mackenzi Lee

167. “It’s more that any conversation about myself makes me feel like a skinned orange, the only shield between myself and the world stripped back by sharp nails until I can be halved and squeezed.”

— Mackenzi Lee

168. “You have climbed through catacombs darker than this, you escaped from a second-story window with only your bedsheets, and you should not be frightened of the darkness, but instead be sure that the most frightening thing in it is you.”

— Mackenzi Lee

169. “She was the same person I had known. Had always known. Just a version that was more completely her.”

— Mackenzi Lee

170. “It’s difficult to be a lady in any professional field, but particularly one no one believes exists. It’s amazing the way men find to box you out of even imaginary places.”

— Mackenzi Lee

171. “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

172. “Love is not a thing you survive upon.”

— Mackenzi Lee

173. “Have you ever thought,” she countered, “that maybe Oliver only acts like a monster because you treat him like one?”

— Mackenzi Lee

174. “Perhaps I didn’t really know anyone. Perhaps everyone was just a fiction inside my head.”

— Mackenzi Lee

175. “Come on.” He snuffles his face into my shoulder, which I think he’s trying to disguise as affection when really he’s using me as a towel.”

— Mackenzi Lee

176. “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

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

— Mackenzi Lee

178. “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

179. “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

180. “There’s really nothing to do but pretend I’m fully clothed and in control of the situation. So I walk up to Percy and say, “There you are. I think we should be going.” They’re.”

— Mackenzi Lee

181. “The great tragic love story of Percy and me is neither great nor truly a love story, and is tragic only for its single-sidedness. It is also not an epic monolith that has plagued me since boyhood, as might be expected. Rather, it is simply the tale of how two people can be important to each other their whole lives, and then, one morning, quite without meaning to, one of them wakes to find that importance has been magnified into a sudden and intense desire to put his tongue in the other’s mouth.”

— Mackenzi Lee

182. “Everyone wants things,” Monty says. “Everyone’s got a hunger like that. It passes. Or it gets easier to live with. It stops eating you up inside.” I scrunch my nose and sniff. 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 out, and who can live like that?”

— Mackenzi Lee

183. “He raises an eyebrow, an unmistakable tread carefully, and so of course I put on my heaviest boots and start clomping through the flower gardens.”

— Mackenzi Lee

184. “The distance is great, and nothing is so hard to find as something that no one has yet found.”

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

188. “It would be so much easier if I did not want to know everything so badly. If I did not want so badly to be reliant upon no soul by myself.”

— Mackenzi Lee

189. “I’ve learned not to walk in with pistols drawn, but rather to keep them hidden in my petticoats with a hand surreptitiously upon the heel.”

— Mackenzi Lee

190. “I had kissed my fair share of lads who had only used me as a counterpoint to their own virtue. My primary contribution to our circles back home had been making everyone else feel grounded and well-behaved in comparison.”

— Mackenzi Lee

191. “Percy sees me off at the door with more affirming words but no hug or even a pat upon the shoulder. Thank god for friends who learn to speak to you in your own language rather than making you learn theirs.”

— Mackenzi Lee

192. “It is impossible to explain how you can love someone so much that it’s difficult to be around him. And.”

— Mackenzi Lee

193. “Be a little less honest and a little more tactful.”

— Mackenzi Lee

194. “Dear Lord, you haven’t been a virgin all this while, have you?” “No, but I’m a bit concerned my virginity is starting to grow back.”

— Mackenzi Lee

195. “I’m caught between wanting to smack the pox patches off this woman’s face and to smack Percy because I’m still angry about our kiss. Perhaps I could get them both with a wide swing.”

— Mackenzi Lee

196. “A gentleman doesn’t tell.”

— Mackenzi Lee

197. “I want him to come lie down with me, fit his body around mine like spoons in a drawer and not ask a thing and not be bothered by the silence.”

— Mackenzi Lee

198. “All boys are their fathers.”

— Mackenzi Lee

199. “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 moments.”

— Mackenzi Lee

200. “Perhaps you could find something more accurate. You could call yourselves the Society where Hospitality is Ignored Totally. Or, for short –.”

— Mackenzi Lee