Top 140 K.J. Charles Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “This was her family, chosen by love rather than bound by birth, and infinitely stronger for it.”

— K.J. Charles

2. “They say Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but it’s not true. Hell hath no fury like the one who did the scorning, especially when they’re made to face up to their actions.”

— K.J. Charles

3. “I’m tired of being the villain in the story. I never meant to be, and I don’t want to do it any more.”

— K.J. Charles

4. “Everyone can do evil. Some people can be forced to it, and some fight against it, and some don’t even need an invitation.”

— K.J. Charles

5. “I don’t understand it. Why can’t people let everyone else get on with their lives? What possible reason is there for seeing someone not doing any harm, taking a bit of pleasure, and deciding to ruin it, for nothing?”

— K.J. Charles

6. “I love you dearly, my friend. I always will, but even without my tastes, I think we would not have grown well together. The fact is, you want an ally. I prefer a challenge. You want agreement; I want contraries. I want Silas.”

— K.J. Charles

7. “If you’re going to be insolent, at least pour me coffee.” “It’s brewing. Like trouble.”

— K.J. Charles

8. “If you trust someone, that means letting them into a position where they can really hurt you, and believing they won’t. And if you’re afraid to do that, either you aren’t sure of them, or you aren’t sure of yourself.”

— K.J. Charles

9. “Let me be frank. I find you intriguing, and extremely appealing, and delightful company, and very much a man who deserves more pleasure in his life. If you’d like to take that pleasure with me, I’d be honoured. If you aren’t so minded, don’t take offence at the offer, and I shan’t at the refusal. And if you decide you’d prefer Corvin, for example, I shall bow out like a gentleman, although I shall probably kick him in the shins at some point from pure envy.”

— K.J. Charles

10. “He had always found hope harder to deal with than despair. Despair didn’t get disappointed.”

— K.J. Charles

11. “Society is a consequential fool, and I am tired of rules and strictures that do no good and bring nobody happiness.”

— K.J. Charles

12. “It’s not useless, it’s the future. Tell them Bonaparte’s growing sugar beet.” “I’d rather not, Sir Philip. It wouldn’t help.” “Then tell them I’m a violent eccentric and their very lives depend on doing this properly.” “Mmm,” Lovett said. “Perhaps there’s a middle way?”

— K.J. Charles

13. “I don’t believe in demons and pitchforks. But I think, if you had to define hell, you could take a good man and deny him the rites he believed in, and condemn his soul to a slow process of corruption until it was nothing but a mass of rage and hate and seething evil that his true self would have loathed. I think that would be hell.”

— K.J. Charles

14. “I should rather be a loyal liar than an honest traitor.”

— K.J. Charles

15. “The question was never whether I loved you,” Alec whispered. “It was, How brave am I? or maybe How afraid am I? And it turns out I’m slightly braver than I am afraid when it comes to you. Tell me what I need to do so we can be together and neither of us gets arrested for anything, and I’ll do it.”

— K.J. Charles

16. “You do know that bad people aren’t generally redeemed by the love of a good woman, or man, don’t you? Most people don’t change, and if they do, it’s not because of someone else.”

— K.J. Charles

17. “I can’t love you again,” Ben said, his heart aching on the words. “How can I, when I never stopped? I couldn’t stop loving you when I hated you so much it made me sick to think about you. I used to dream about killing you and wake up crying because I thought you were dead. I can’t not love you. I don’t know how.”

— K.J. Charles

18. “Most people think that nobody should make a fuss until it’s their own comfort at stake, at which point they will bring the roof down shrieking about it.”

— K.J. Charles

19. “Red is the hue of royalty in Ruritania: as the old saying has it, “If he’s red, he’s right!” I invite you to consider what this means. For a family to remain red-headed and blue-eyed down two centuries, in a land not filled with redheads or aristocrats, requires either careful breeding or a failure to grasp simple principles of stock management.”

— K.J. Charles

20. “There really were no chains like the ones in your head.”

— K.J. Charles

21. “I have been coming to love you for a long time, you damned seditious brute, as I almost found the courage to tell you earlier. Wednesday by Wednesday, week by week, I have loved you.”

— K.J. Charles

22. “Arrogant, beautiful, domineering Lord Crane, with the caring that made Stephen’s heart break, and the vicious streak that made his knees bend, had chosen him among all the men’s men of London, and treated him with a loyalty, generosity and almost painful honesty that made Stephen’s heart hurt. And his reward was a few doled-out crumbs of Stephen’s time in a country he hated.”

— K.J. Charles

23. “Rowley had thought at first the beast had no name; it had taken him a while to understand that it had a perfectly good, descriptive name to which it was as likely to answer as any other, and that name was Cat. There was something terribly Clem about that.”

— K.J. Charles

24. “Dear fellow, he may rip the balls off anyone he sees fit,” Julius said. “Cry havoc, Cyprian, and consider me your dog of war.”

— K.J. Charles

25. “Thank God they were British. He took a deep breath. “Cup of tea?”

— K.J. Charles

26. “I don’t see any advantage in reaching the age of fifty without pain if you’ve also reached it without pleasure,” Corvin said. “And really, a broken heart is a great deal less than a broken leg. ‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

— K.J. Charles

27. “I like to make you know your master,” Crane said. “It’s only fair. The rest of the time you’ve got me so thoroughly enslaved, I might as well be wearing a collar with your name on it.”

— K.J. Charles

28. “Saul sighed. “I swear, no jury would convict me.”

— K.J. Charles

29. “Suffice to say I love Kim dearly, but ‘love’ means an awful lot of things. I think more people should understand that.”

— K.J. Charles

30. “Nothing had changed, nothing to remedy his pain and anger and hate. Jonah was a thief, a liar, an accessory to murder. But he had said ‘Score me a try’, and the words had stabbed Ben’s heart with sweetness.”

— K.J. Charles

31. “If you can’t be happy, then be something else. Be useful, that would be good. Decorative, if you like. Selfish, if you must. But don’t whine about it.”

— K.J. Charles

32. “The more love you give, the more you are capable of giving. It’s only when you shut off the source that it dries up.”

— K.J. Charles

33. “It didn’t have quite the melancholy feel of lost hopes and the futility of human endeavour that would have suited his mood, but it was still moderately picturesque.”

— K.J. Charles

34. “Wednesday by Wednesday, week by week, I have become yours for the taking.”

— K.J. Charles

35. “I like the way he says ‘furthermore’,” Merrick observed quietly. “Cos you can tell he means ‘wankers’.”

— K.J. Charles

36. “He’d always wanted to stand alone ; he’d always thought of reliance on others as a house of cards, a fragile structure that could be pushed over at any time. And that was true : people betrayed, and left, and died. He hadn’t been wrong. Only, he hadn’t considered that a card on its own couldn’t stand at all.”

— K.J. Charles

37. “Some people had strong views on attacking a man from behind. Well, Will did himself, those views being that it was an excellent idea, best done with a blade. He missed the Messer.”

— K.J. Charles

38. “When people are obliged to keep an eye out for threats, their eyes tend to be sharp. That’s what women’s intuition means, if you ask me: being unconsciously alert for dangerous men.”

— K.J. Charles

39. “Why do we count the cost of change, but not the cost of the world staying the same?”

— K.J. Charles

40. “If you couldn’t have a thing without hurting someone who didn’t deserve it, you shouldn’t have it.”

— K.J. Charles

41. “You said what you wanted, that’s all, and since it was very easy for me to get what I wanted while giving you what you wanted –.”

— K.J. Charles

42. “What I mean is, one can’t help one’s fears. The question isn’t if you’re a fellow who cries in the night before a big engagement – and I knew a damned brave man who did exactly that, regularly. It’s whether you pick yourself up the next day.”

— K.J. Charles

43. “You’re remarkably uninteresting for a flying trollop.”

— K.J. Charles

44. “He doesn’t remember her birthday or bring her silks, or ever do thoughtful things like that. He just works to make her safe and happy, because that’s how he loves people.”

— K.J. Charles

45. “Ben looked up, and the foundations of his life began to crumble.”

— K.J. Charles

46. “You don’t get what you want by not asking for it.”

— K.J. Charles

47. “And he owned a lot of books, although just now and then, when it got dark and the shelves loomed over him, he got the feeling that they owned him.”

— K.J. Charles

48. “He glanced at the book in his hand and added, “I think I’d need to be a bit further away to grasp it, mind you. Manchester, perhaps.” Da Silva looked startled for a second, then his face lit with a smile.”

— K.J. Charles

49. “He was a member of the Diogenes Club, to which he had been nominated by one of his more peculiar acquaintances, a Government man whose intellectual capacity was matched only by his physical corpulence.”

— K.J. Charles

50. “Fine,” Will said. “I promise. I promise I’ll just bugger off whenever it seems like the easy way out for me, and leave you in this hundred-room hellhole with your family rubbing cheese-graters on your nerve endings. Is that what you want to hear?” “I detect a note of sarcasm.”

— K.J. Charles