Mackenzi Lee · 513 pages
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“God bless the book people for their boundless knowledge absorbed from having words instead of friends.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with laquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“Just thinking about all that blood." I nearly shudder. "Doesn't it make you a bit squeamish?"
"Ladies haven't the luxury of being squeamish about blood," she replies, and Percy and I go fantastically red in unison.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“We're not courting trouble," I say. "Flirting with it, at most.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“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.
A long, slow slide, then a sudden impact.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“It's beginning to feel like he's shuffling his way through the seven deadly sins, in ascending order of my favourites.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“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, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“I swear, you would play the coquette with a well-upholstered sofa."
"First, I would not. And second, how handsome is this sofa?”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from 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, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“Oh no."
Percy looks sideways at me. "Oh no what?"
I swallow. "I'd first like it to be noted that I am most certainly not a smuggler."
"Monty..." he says, my name sopping with dread.
"And," I continue overtop him, "I'd like you to both remember just how much you adore me and how dull and gloomy your lives would be without me in them."
"What did you do?”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“It is remarkable how much courage it takes to kiss someone, even when you are almost certain that person would very much like to be kissed by you. Doubt will knock you from the sky every time.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“What’s the use of temptations if we don’t yield to them?”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“I love you, but I don’t know how to help you. I still don’t! I’m an emotional delinquent and I say wrong things all the time, but I want to be better for you. I promise that. It doesn’t matter to me that you’re ill and it doesn’t matter if I have to give up everything, because you’re worth it. You’re worth it all because you are magnificent, you are. Magnificent and gorgeous and brilliant and kind and good and I just . . . love you, Percy. I love you so damn much.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“It occurs to me then that perhaps getting my little sister drunk and explaining why I screw boys is not the most responsible move on my part.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“Against the sky, the stars crown him, marking the edges of his silhouette like he is a constellation of himself.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“I have lived most of my life as a devotee of the philosophy that a man should not see two sevens in one day,”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“In the east," she says after a time, her gaze still downcast, "there is a tradition known as kintsukuroi. It is the practice of mending broken ceramic pottery using lacquer dusted with gold and silver and other precious metals. It is meant to symbolize that things can be more beautiful for having been broken."
"Why are you telling me this?" I ask.
At last she looks at me. Her irises are polished obsidian in the moonlight. "Because I want you to know," she says, "that there is life after survival.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“I wish I could be better for you." She looks over at me, and I duck my head, shame sinking its teeth in. "I'm older and I know I'm supposed to be... an example, I don't know. At least someone you aren't embarrassed of."
"You do fine."
"I don't"
"You're right, you don't. But you're getting better. And that isn't nothing.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“And then Jesus says, 'Well, watch this' - "
"Really? Well, watch this?"
"That's biblical language."
"If your Bible is written by Henry Montague.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“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, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“it’s hard not to see. You’re the kind of pair that makes everyone around them feel as though they’re missing out on a private joke.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“Can’t seal up a conversation with a casual Oh, by the way, could you perhaps not touch me the way you always have because each time it puts fresh splinters in my heart? Particularly when what I’d really like to say is Oh, by the way, could you please keep touching me, and perhaps do it all the time, and while we’re at it, would you like to take off all your clothes and climb in bed? They’re both weighted alike.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“He raises his head. "You're nothing like your father, Monty. For a start, you're far more decent than he is."
I'm not sure how, after all the terrible things I've done, he can possibly mean that. "You might be the only person left on earth who thinks me decent."
Between us, I feel his knuckles brush mine. Perhaps it's by chance, but it feels more like a question, and when I spread my fingers in answer, his hand slides into mine.
"Then everyone else doesn't know you.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“If the Good Lord didn't want men to play with themselves, we'd have hooks for hands.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
“I have become a veritable scholar in seemingly innocent ploys to get his skin against mine.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
Mackenzi Lee
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“Nunca se sabe, hasta el final, si lo que un día cualquiera nos sucede es historia o simple contingencia, si es todo (por trivial que parezca) o es nada (por doloroso que sea).”
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“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”
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