Top 250 Mackenzi Lee Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Can we not simply be people, each of us with cogs in our brains that turn slightly differently, and some that need oiling and alignment and upkeep more than others?”

— Mackenzi Lee

152. “I would teach my body to regrow my heart each time I gave it to him, over and over and over again. Heart after heart after heart – every one of them his.”

— Mackenzi Lee

153. “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

154. “Has that been your leg all this while?” “What?” He unhooks his foot from around my calf. “I thought it was the chair. Sorry about that. Dear Lord, why didn’t you say something?” Before.”

— Mackenzi Lee

155. “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

156. “You can’t, I am thinking. You can’t be ill because I need you and you can’t go away to die in some asylum because what am I supposed to do without you?”

— Mackenzi Lee

157. “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

158. “I don’t think he was allowed to take supper with them when they had company, but, with some exceptions of that sort, they’ve been first-rate to him.”

— Mackenzi Lee

159. “The plausibility of a worry has never stopped me from asking it to dance.”

— Mackenzi Lee

160. “You had decided I was not to be trusted, that I was slippery and cruel and wily, because of a lot of old stories you had read about me? How disappointed you must have been when it was me who showed up instead of my brother with sunshine spurting out of his ass.”

— Mackenzi Lee

161. “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

162. “Ugh. Feelings.” I take a long drink, then pass her the bottle. She has another delicate sip. “You were right – it’s less horrid now.”

— Mackenzi Lee

163. “He seems like he wants to touch me, but we’ve lost any sense of how men who haven’t kissed each other do that.”

— Mackenzi Lee

164. “Someday, you little twat, it’s going to be more than that. The way we start doesn’t have to be where we end up.”

— Mackenzi Lee

165. “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

166. “No one gets to decide who you are.”

— Mackenzi Lee

167. “I have challenged fate to chess and am now attempting to keep all my confidence from puddling in my boots. What if I’m the only one betting on myself because everyone but me can see I am not suited to play at all?”

— Mackenzi Lee

168. “It wasn’t the best strategy for dealing with emotions, but it was his strategy.”

— Mackenzi Lee

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Mackenzi Lee

172. “I am somehow stuck with an obstinate mount that resembles less a horse and more a leggy sausage, and seems fond of ingesting my commands and then ignoring them in their entirety.”

— Mackenzi Lee

173. “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

174. “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

175. “It took several thousand miles for me to begin believing that I am better than the worst things I’ve done. But I’m starting.”

— Mackenzi Lee

176. “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

177. “Not a man is going to protect me, because this is a woman’s fight, and we are going to protect ourselves!”

— Mackenzi Lee

178. “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

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

— Mackenzi Lee

180. “Lakshmibai was forced to abandon Jhansi, but she left it the same way she fought for it– on horseback, with her song strapped to her back.”

— Mackenzi Lee

181. “What’s the use of temptations if we don’t yield to them?”

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

183. “I like curling my hair and twirling in skirts with ruffles, and I like how Max looks with that big pink bow on. And that doesn’t mean I’m not still smart and capable and strong.”

— Mackenzi Lee

184. “Dear. Lord. Fortune has well and truly vomited down my front in the form of Mr. Lockwood. As.”

— Mackenzi Lee

185. “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

186. “Fortune favors the flirtatious.”

— Mackenzi Lee

187. “When he speaks again, his tone is nearer to reverence, a voice for saints and sacred places.”

— Mackenzi Lee

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “I thrive only in extremely specific conditions.”

— Mackenzi Lee

198. “I’m trying to tell you I love you, you sod.”

— Mackenzi Lee

199. “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

200. “Lucky for me as well, or else we might never have met, and then what would have been the point of my life?”

— Mackenzi Lee