The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue Quotes

“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, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“Are you going to be sick?”
I raise my head. The duke is gone, but Helena is on the window seat, twisting her necklace around her fingers. I don’t answer, because I don’t believe a prisoner owes his captors any sort of report on his health. That, and if I’m going to be sick, I’d prefer to do it all over her, and I’d prefer it to be a stealth attack.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“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, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“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, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“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, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“So long as you don’t go falling in love with me.” I don’t know why I say it. Call it battlements around my helpless heart. Percy looks away from me fast, shoulders curling up. It almost looks like a flinch. But then he says, “I’ll try my best.” He”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“brushes his mouth against the corner of mine, and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it takes every ounce of the not-inconsiderable restraint I’ve spent years exercising around Percy not to rip all my clothes off right then, passersby be damned. But I am nothing if not a gentleman, and a gentleman does not take his trousers off in a public place, particularly if the great love of his life is asking him to refrain.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“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, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“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, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“It’s a strange feeling, realizing that other people you don’t know have their own full lives that don’t touch yours. I”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved. “May I kiss you?” I ask. “Abso-bloody-lutely you may,” he says. And so I do.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“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, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“Don’t drink too much.” “Could I get an absolute value on too much?”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“Do you know how horrid it feels to watch my brother get tossed out of the best boarding school of England, then get to travel the Continent as a reward, while 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, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“Yes, for education. An actual education, not finishing school—they’re going to squeeze me into corsets and bully me into silence.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“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, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“Ladies haven’t the luxury of being squeamish about blood,” she replies, and Percy and I go fantastically red in unison.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“Percy, I could say,I think you are the most beautiful creature on God's green earth and I would very much like to find a hidden corner of this opera house and engage in some behavior that could only be termedsinful.Percy, I could say, I am almost certain that I am in love with you.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“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, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“It wasn’t the first time I’d thought it—wouldn’t be the last either, though I didn’t know that then—but it was the first time I’d said it aloud, to anyone. It’s a strange thing, to want to die. Stranger still when you don’t feel you deserve to get away so easily.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“They likely would not have been able to be open about it. But the optimist in me likes to believe that the twenty-first century is not the first time in history that queer people have been able to live full romantic and sexual lives with the people they love. And if that makes me anachronistic,”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“When I look back on it now, I realize that must have been the first time, in all the while we’d known each other, it occurred to me that Percy might actually be rather handsome. Perspective is a goddamn son of a bitch.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“I want to touch him abso-bloody-lutely evrywhere.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“It is impossible to explain how you can love someone so much that it’s difficult to be around him. And”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“Love may be a grand thing, but goddamn if it doesn’t take up more than its fair share of space inside a man.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“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, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“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, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“I’m not sure how we are in the middle of a pirate siege and I’m arguing with this bigot about Percy’s nationality.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“From my first sighting, I fall in immediate and passionate love with Venice.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue