Top 40 Victoria Lee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I thought you loved me.”

— Victoria Lee

2. “Those jeans’re so tight I can see your religion.”

— Victoria Lee

3. “Governments didn’t have to listen to the people until the people made it hurt not to listen.”

— Victoria Lee

4. “When Noam was a kid and felt picky about choking down gefilte fish on Pesach, his dad sat him down and told him the story of la pobre viejecita. Once upon a time, there was an old lady with nothing to eat but meat, fruit and sweets... and he’d flop another lump of poached fish on Noam’s plate and say, “God bless us with the poverty of that poor old woman.”

— Victoria Lee

5. “For the first time in years, Dara wanted to live.”

— Victoria Lee

6. “Noam held a storm in his hands, and he couldn’t feel a thing.”

— Victoria Lee

7. “Dara had a way of making even the mundane extraordinary.”

— Victoria Lee

8. “The boy in this mirror was steel and frost and a bloodied knife. And he wasn’t afraid of anything.”

— Victoria Lee

9. “The question isn’t whether magic is real. It’s whether I can touch it without being consumed by it.”

— Victoria Lee

10. “No. I won’t let you ruin my life for entertainment. I’m not Melpomene, to inspire your next great and tragic art. You don’t have the right.”

— Victoria Lee

11. “He used to love small spaces, in fact – had filled his room in Lehrer’s apartment with dozens of houseplants with wide frond-like leaves, vines that dangled down from the ceiling like Spanish moss.”

— Victoria Lee

12. “For coffee-stained girls in libraries.”

— Victoria Lee

13. “But I want to find a loose thread on the collar of her shirt and tug. I want to unravel her.”

— Victoria Lee

14. “For once, the forest is empty of ghosts, the sky is clear and glittering. Nothing evil can touch us like this. We’re dryads cavorting in autumn, wood spirits breathing out starlight.”

— Victoria Lee

15. “Dr. Ortega once described psychotic depression as being like a gun: my genetics loaded the chamber with bullets, my mother passed the weapon into my hand, but Alex’s death pulled the trigger.”

— Victoria Lee

16. “There’s something so freeing about cutting myself loose from technology in some small way. No more stressing over profile pictures or whether my social media feeds reflect the kind of golden, idealized life I want everyone to think I have. No more virus scans or junk mail or counting likes. If I want to look something up, I go to the library. If I want to talk to someone, I talk to them.”

— Victoria Lee

17. “I envy her. No one in my family cares about literature at all. My mother views my love of reading with the same vague bafflement with which she viewed my former interest in running – a hobby one might reference in polite conversation, but ultimately unnecessary.”

— Victoria Lee

18. “The poems circle the same question: how one’s soul could possibly endure when life’s beauty vanishes from reach.”

— Victoria Lee

19. “I don’t know how much there is to say. I’m not a very interesting person, I’m afraid.”

— Victoria Lee

20. “Is this what it feels like to be a ghost? To haunt the same halls over and over, waiting for someone to see you, to speak to you, to call for you or send you away again?”

— Victoria Lee

21. “A story told again and again is never the same story as the original.”

— Victoria Lee

22. “I still feel her fingers tangled up in the threads of my fate.”

— Victoria Lee

23. “I spent nearly a year away from this place in my own brand of seclusion, but as soon as I come back, there are ghosts at my heels and stories of dead witches on everyone’s tongues.”

— Victoria Lee

24. “The problem is, I don’t have anything I want to read. I peruse the shelves, but nothing jumps out at me. I feel as if I’ve read everything – every book in the world. Every title seems like a reiteration of something that came before it, the same story regurgitated over and over.”

— Victoria Lee

25. “Noam knew it was already too late to repair his mistakes. Whatever he and Dara had was broken now. And it was no one’s fault but his own.”

— Victoria Lee

26. “Dara couldn’t keep screaming the truth again and again, and never being heard.”

— Victoria Lee

27. “This whole night already feels bizarre, like the world viewed through a kaleidoscope.”

— Victoria Lee

28. “Ellis quivers too – a very slight tremor to her hands, detectable only because I notice everything about her.”

— Victoria Lee

29. “When I read books, the boundary between my world and others shifted. I could imagine other realities. I envisioned the tales so clearly that it was as if I lived them.”

— Victoria Lee

30. “Just so,” Ellis interjects. “As Astell said herself: It were well if we could look into the very Soul of the beloved Person, to discover what resemblance it bears to our own.”

— Victoria Lee

31. “And up this high, pinned against the eastern face with thin air crystallizing in my lungs, I am the only thing left alive.”

— Victoria Lee

32. “You can still feel history in these halls; at any moment you might turn the corner and find yourself face to face with a ghost from the past.”

— Victoria Lee

33. “You’re obsessed with magic because you can’t stand to live with yourself otherwise.”

— Victoria Lee

34. “She wouldn’t understand that magic can be a metaphor, like Ellis said. That magic doesn’t have to be magic for it to mean something. That sometimes magic is a salve over a burn, and it’s the only way you can heal.”

— Victoria Lee

35. “I want to argue that plenty of people manage to believe in ghosts and witches without others questioning their sanity.”

— Victoria Lee

36. “Don’t you ever wish you could go back?” Ellis murmurs, gaze turned up toward the chandeliers; their light glitters off the lenses of her glasses. My gaze snaps away from the kettle, back to her. “To some other time,” she says, “when things were a little wilder. When the rules were a little less clear.”

— Victoria Lee

37. “When classes start, Godwin will be home to a brand new crop of students: third- and fourth-years with bright eyes and souls they sold to literature. Girls who might prefer Oates to Shelley, Alcott to Allende. Girls who know nothing of blood and smoke, the darker kinds of magic.”

— Victoria Lee

38. “Dalloway School rises from the Catskill foothills like a crown upon an auburn head.”

— Victoria Lee

39. “Outbreaks of magic started all kinds of ways. Maybe a tank coming in from the quarantined zone didn’t get hosed down properly. Maybe, like some people said, the refugees brought it up with them from Atlantia, the virus hiding out in someone’s blood or in a juicy peach pie. But when magic infected the slums of west Durham, in the proud sovereign nation of Carolinia, it didn’t matter how it got there. Everybody still died.”

— Victoria Lee

40. “My world reduces to sensation. The lights are too bright, sounds overloud. People speak to me, and although I hear them and respond, two minutes later I can’t remember what they said or what it meant.”

— Victoria Lee

41. “I still feel ghosts around me: the ghosts of the five Dalloway girls who defied the boxes and coffins the world tried to put them in. The ghosts of other women who attended or worked at this school, but whose legacies were forgotten instead of deified. The ghosts of every girl who came here and felt history beneath her feet. But I’m not haunted anymore. Maybe I never was.”

— Victoria Lee

42. “Ellis is something new, and it feels like she creates and unravels me in the same moment, a sentence she writes and erases and rewrites, a product of her wants and imagination. I feel like she invented me.”

— Victoria Lee

43. “Besides,” Dara said, “he didn’t see me the way other people did.”

— Victoria Lee

44. “Don’t you ever,” Dara said, his voice low and very, very even, “touch me again.”

— Victoria Lee

45. “I need to be able to touch the dark without being consumed by it.”

— Victoria Lee

46. “I can barely stand to exist in this place anymore.”

— Victoria Lee

47. “I find myself glancing back, as if to make sure my Eurydice still follows.”

— Victoria Lee