Top 250 Mackenzi Lee Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Mackenzi Lee

226. “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

227. “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

228. “A gentleman doesn’t tell.”

— Mackenzi Lee

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Mackenzi Lee

232. “Or perhaps that’s just me assigning subterranean levels to every goddamn breath he takes.”

— Mackenzi Lee

233. “What am I supposed to see in this closet? More skeletons? Don’t you humans have a saying about that?”

— Mackenzi Lee

234. “He is tired of surviving. He wants to live.”

— Mackenzi Lee

235. “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

236. “Earth is so determined to make everything that’s hard for a man doubly hard for a woman.”

— Mackenzi Lee

237. “Music is not an art I claim to understand or enjoy, but Percy looks so happy in that moment that I feel happy too.”

— Mackenzi Lee

238. “I have become so accustomed to living on the edge of hysteria that this sudden calm is almost more frightening.”

— Mackenzi Lee

239. “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

240. “So I spend several days in lonely solitude, not wanting to initiate conversation but also desperate for it, but also certain that once I have it, the only things I’ll want is to be back in my cabin, alone.”

— Mackenzi Lee

241. “I would then write and rewrite and edit and rewrite and edit more and scrutinise the language until it no longer sounded like English and I had convinced myself was illiterate and no one had ever had the heart to tell me.”

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

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

— Mackenzi Lee

247. “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

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

— Mackenzi Lee

249. “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

250. “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