Top 140 K.J. Charles Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “There’s no good doing the right thing unless you stop people doing the wrong thing.”

— K.J. Charles

52. “Firstly, because it’s his, just as all I am and all I have are his.”

— K.J. Charles

53. “I don’t, can’t bed men for whom I don’t care.”

— K.J. Charles

54. “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

55. “Stephen can, of course, use my power, for two reasons. Firstly, because it’s his, just as all I am and all I have are his. Not that he ever asks, of course. I’m not sure that he quite believes it.” He looked round at Stephen, a rueful smile dawning, ignoring Fairley’s loud noises of disgust. “But I do hope you are aware, my sweet, somewhere in that absurd heart, that I am ever, entirely, and quite pathetically yours.”

— K.J. Charles

56. “But I do hope you are aware, my sweet, somewhere in that absurd heart, that I am ever, entirely, and quite pathetically yours.”

— K.J. Charles

57. “Come to bed with me, you blasted radical. Bring me your revolution.”

— K.J. Charles

58. “He had no idea if he was being served or mastered now. Both, or neither, it didn’t matter.”

— K.J. Charles

59. “Kim was starlight and privilege; Will had his feet firmly fixed in the mud. They didn’t belong together. Except they did.”

— K.J. Charles

60. “It’s a bright shadow,” Clem said with fierce intensity, and Rowley’s throat closed. For the words, and their meaning, and for Clem’s open look, without the nervous apprehension and the hint of a stammer. For the trust that allowed him in moments like this to drop his ever-present guard. Hell.”

— K.J. Charles

61. “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

62. “The silky dressing gown was open, revealing his smooth, bare chest and, Curtis couldn’t but notice, dark nipples, one of which – oh, good God – was pierced with a silver ring.”

— K.J. Charles

63. “My dear chap, this is a bookshop. There’s never anywhere better to be.”

— K.J. Charles

64. “I have no quarrel with democrats in principle, except that they are as much frauds and liars as the rest. It is often said that mankind will not be free till the last king is strangled with the guts of the last priest; if you ask me, the man who ordered the strangling would promptly step forth to proclaim himself Lord Protector, and it would all begin again.”

— K.J. Charles

65. “Nobody would believe that Richard left evening pleasures promptly because it gave him longer in his valet’s company, that he took such care over his clothing because it made two hours’ dressing with Cyprian unexceptional. That he would rather talk to a liveried servant than to any of the gentlemen who were his closest friends.”

— K.J. Charles

66. “Such an easy thing, to be liked. All you had to do was make sure people didn’t know you.”

— K.J. Charles

67. “Did anyone wonder if someone hit his head for him?”

— K.J. Charles

68. “Miles was well aware that “yes” meant nothing when you couldn’t say “no”. If Toby wasn’t in a position to refuse, he wasn’t in a position to consent, and there was no more to be said on the subject.”

— K.J. Charles

69. “I love you,” Julius observed at last. “To a degree that frankly startles me.”

— K.J. Charles

70. “I see no reason the duties of Second Villain shouldn’t include being First Villain’s helpless sexual plaything. It would make the melodramas a great deal more entertaining.”

— K.J. Charles

71. “I hope you find some of these as snugly up your alley as I find you up mine.”

— K.J. Charles

72. “He’d been apprenticed to a joiner before the war, but that felt like decades ago: all he was good at now was killing people, which was discouraged.”

— K.J. Charles

73. “If Guy had been asked at any point in his entire adult life prior to this week how he might envisage himself speaking to Sir Philip Rookwood, “planning illicit amours” would have been the least likely answer imaginable, matched only in its implausibility by “up a tree”.”

— K.J. Charles

74. “So many things mattered about Kim. The way his deep brown eyes lit when he smiled, the intense concentration he brought to work or to bed. How he had made undrinkably weak tea for Will just once, watched him make his own with catlike attention, and got it spoon-dissolvingly perfect ever since. There were so many tiny wisping moments of trust and truth and vulnerability that had slowly become something real and solid between them, and Will didn’t want it to slip through his fingers. Not again.”

— K.J. Charles

75. “You like ’em dangerous, that’s your trouble. If they ain’t leaving a trail of dead, you ain’t interested.”

— K.J. Charles

76. “Susan had often been told that women should not show anger. She’d concluded early on that this meant she should not emulate Nathaniel, whose rare but spectacular rages were always short-lived, but rather Justin, who was coldly vicious and could hold a grudge forever.”

— K.J. Charles

77. “The house is decaying, the furnishings are museum pieces, half the staff are consumed with loathing of me out of loyalty to my father, or because I remind them of my brother. In any case, they’re people who lived in the same house as Hector when there are perfectly good ditches to die in, which tells you as much as you need to know.”

— K.J. Charles

78. “Our will and fates do so contrary run.”

— K.J. Charles

79. “We can all kill people. I could have put a pillow over your face while you slept at any time in the last twenty years, and I’m struggling to recall why I haven’t.”

— K.J. Charles

80. “What I say is, one can be as moral as one likes, but one should have the courtesy to do it in private, like any other bad habit.”

— K.J. Charles

81. “I’m well aware of my good fortune. I’m well aware I ought to be happy, we all ought to be happy as the day is long, and dance the night away on the bodies of starving workers. Well, I’m not bloody happy.” He knocked back his gin. It rasped down his throat like a rusty blade. Silas watched him as he tried not to cough it back up. “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

82. “When I have you, sweet boy, it will be because you want me to. Not against your better judgement, not in spite of my surname, and definitely not to annoy your aunt.”

— K.J. Charles

83. “Richard couldn’t adorn David’s ears with jewels and doubted very much he’d want them. Even the plainest gifts would be attention-grabbing, inappropriate, dangerous. Richard would just have to give his valet the world instead.”

— K.J. Charles

84. “You cannot protect her from failure, so you might as well give her the best chance to succeed.”

— K.J. Charles

85. “Clem didn’t seem to have whatever ability it was that let other people “just tell,” and it felt as if there was an entire world of communication going on at a pitch he couldn’t hear. Not.”

— K.J. Charles

86. “I almost never respond to literary criticism with homicide.”

— K.J. Charles

87. “But I don’t think you have. I feel more – more loving, in all the different ways, than I ever have in my life. I feel as though, while you love me, I could be better and kinder to the whole world. If that’s not virtue, I don’t know what is.”

— K.J. Charles

88. “This is what I keep telling you, Saint. You have to think,” Stephen said. “If you’d put a knee in his groin first, you could probably have punched him in the face as well when he went over.”

— K.J. Charles

89. “Aye, duty. You do yours and I do mine. Only, my duty, as I see it, is to tell people there’s a better way than tyranny and unjust law. And yours is to uphold the law when you ain’t too busy breaking it bent over in a whorehouse.”

— K.J. Charles

90. “She had a fire and a good book; what more did a woman need?”

— K.J. Charles

91. “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

92. “A story without an ending is an unbearable itch to the reader.”

— K.J. Charles

93. “I had to let someone know who I was: not merely Simon’s assistant, his chronicler, his poor scribbling friend, but the great love of a great life. That I may have lived in his shadow, but I was always by his side. That I was as needful to him as air.”

— K.J. Charles

94. “He was an excellent swordsman, sported a waxed moustache that was in my opinion a greater crime than any he committed with the blade, and had no sense of humour, but he was tolerable.”

— K.J. Charles

95. “His shirtsleeves were rolled up against the heat, baring forearms that Theo wanted, suddenly and urgently, to squeeze between his thighs.”

— K.J. Charles

96. “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

97. “Something difficult for you isn’t less difficult because other people have different problems.”

— K.J. Charles

98. “That was the sort of thing people said and then it turned out they hadn’t meant that at all. Clem knew he didn’t recognise sarcasm because he had been told so, repeatedly. Even so, he was very nearly positive that Mr. Green meant every word.”

— K.J. Charles

99. “He feared in his bones that he’d give in if Dom asked, and Dom knew it and didn’t ask. Silas loved him more for that, with a heart so poorly suited and so unaccustomed to love that he felt it might burst its banks like one of London’s choked, fetid rivers.”

— K.J. Charles

100. “But I do feel writ in water, and I understand wanting something real, that you’re sure of, and striving for it. I think that’s marvellous, actually.”

— K.J. Charles