The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks Quotes

“I want to stop picking at life like it's a meal I don't want to eat, because I want to. I want to taste it all. I want life to be a feast, even if I have to eat it raw and bloody and burned some days. I will pick bones from my teeth. I will let the juice drip down my chin.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“... there is life after you survive.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“I thrive only in extremely specific conditions.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“... the feeling that you’re not so much living your life as just trying to push through it won’t last forever. Someday you’ll be able to breathe.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“Anyone who says they enjoy my writing is clearly either lying or has terrible taste.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“Why do people assume I know more than I do? I’m an idiot about most things.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“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, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“I want to sleep, I think. I want to stop struggling and give in. I want to let the water take me and never have to be in my own company again. I want to stop dragging myself around, stop feeling the weight of every thought like they're stones pulling me farther and farther under, the seafloor and surface both out of sight. I want to stop feeling weak just because some days, I can hardly carry my heavy heart.

...

I want to belong to myself. I want to stop feeling worthless and pointless and hopeless and less, less, less than everyone else around me. I want to live, not just survive, and fill myself up with all the people who have loved me into this moment and this man. I want to believe I am good and kind and clever and worthy with as much conviction as I have believed the opposites. I want to stop picking at life like it's a meal I don't want to eat, because I want to. I want to taste it all. I want life to be a feast, even if I have to eat it raw and bloody and burned some days. I will pick bones from my teeth. I will let the juice drip down my chin.

...

I want to sleep, I think as the sea rocks me, my name on its breath and my body suspended in its gentle embrace.

But what I say is, "I want to wake up.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“The plausibility of a worry has never stopped me from asking it to dance.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“Walking into hell is always the easiest part. It’s coming back that takes work.”
“But she found a way. We always do, don’t we?”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“It isn't the cold or the water or the sheer exhaustion that leaves me sagging, barely able to hold myself above the surface. It's the weight of the whole goddamn world. It's how hard it is to get out of bed. To believe people who say they love me. To believe my ideas have value or that I am capable of speaking them. The certainty that I'm silly and odd and wrong, a body and soul incorrectly assembled with all the right piece in the wrong places. The urge to scratch myself until I tear away my skin, to bleed myself dry and starve myself and look away, to say the cruelest things possible to myself before anyone else has a chance, to keep saying them until they're all I can hear. All the simple things that seem as easy as breathing for everyone else.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“I'm a lost cause."

"You're not, though," Monty says. "You're doing so much better than you think you are. Believe me, as an expert on lost causes, you're not. You might be in the thick of it now, but that doesn't mean it will always be like this." He reaches out and takes my hand in his, unwrapping my fingers from their strangling fist and pushing his thumb gently into my palm until the crescents from my nails fade. "You're going to come out the other side. Maybe not today. But you will.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“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, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“I thought we might get to know each other better."
"Why?"
"Because we´re brothers."
"So were Cain and Abel.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“there are so many things wrong with me, so many cracks in my foundation, that patching one will hardly help with the stability of the whole. One less corner where the cold seeps in doesn’t matter when the roof still needs fixing and the doors don’t sit right in their frames and why bother with one crack when the whole house is falling down around you? I’ll spend my whole life trying to repair myself and still die a broken person. It sounds exhausting.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“I understand what it's like to feel you'll never see the sun again. But you can learn to see in the dark. Or, if not, you trust that night doesn't last forever”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“Someone told me once," Monty continues, "there is life after you survive."

"What does that mean?" I ask.

"It means the feeling that you're not so much living your life as just trying to push through it won't last forever. Someday you'll be able to breathe. I don't know what your mind tells you, and I know that no matter what I say you likely won't believe it—can't believe it—but I still want you to hear it. You are so young, and you are so brilliant, and you are so good, Adrian. You're so much more of everything that you think you are.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“fumbling introduction to my supposedly dead pirate doctor sister”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“...there is life after you survive.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“... even if you don’t know exactly what you’re talking about, a few official-sounding vagaries and a confident tone often more than does the trick.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“It's not the moment the world splits in two, it's all the days after, trying to live a cleaved life and pretend you never knew it whole and don't feel the space of that missing piece that can never be repaired or replaced. Even the best facsimiles fall short.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“I mean, it feels as though if I don't devote my attention to whatever fake scenario I've come up with, then I won't be ready when it happens.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“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, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“The world of academic research is strange!”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“And I'd rather not obsess about whether or not someone is holding a grudge against me."

"So what if they are? Why does what other people think of you matter so greatly? Usually if someone doesn't like you, they shouldn't matter to you, and if they do, they'll tell you they're upset and you can make it right.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“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, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“I feel like a shipwreck. A house fire nothing but bodies can be pulled from. So full of gaping boards and fallen walls that some days, there doesn't even seem a foundation worth rebuilding upon.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“There's no other choice. You live with it. You keep moving. You keep trying.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“It is so much easier to give into them than to try and fight them off. It’s a relief, like letting go the lead of a dog that’s been wrenching your shoulder with the force of its pulling. But now I have a dog to chase, and I’m running in circles after every catastrophic scenario, struggling to breathe.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“How long can a man live with his own mind against him?”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks