Top 140 K.J. Charles Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Not much. I’ve very little imagination. It’s the imaginative chaps who suffer.” “’The coward dies a thousand deaths.”

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

53. “Well, God knows what you used to be, then, because you’re built like a brick shithouse and hung like a horse.”

— K.J. Charles

54. “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

55. “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

56. “Marry me.” “What? No! Go away.”

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

58. “Those who know, do. Those who understand, teach.”

— K.J. Charles

59. “Someone wanted to choke me to death on my own hair?”

— K.J. Charles

60. “He had no idea what civilians, or civilised people, would say in these circumstances. Thanks for that, old chap, much obliged, perhaps? Ought he apologise for coming in his mouth? Would this be a good moment to restart the conversation about where Kim had learned to use a knife? Thank God they were British. He took a deep breath. “Cup of tea?”

— K.J. Charles

61. “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.”

— K.J. Charles

62. “You need to dress for your own body, not pretend you’ve someone else’s, don’t you think?”

— K.J. Charles

63. “He was an aggressive, forceful, noisy man who thrived on conflict, for whom divergent opinions were airy-fairy nonsense or weakness, and anyone else’s expertise was a threat.”

— K.J. Charles

64. “No strings, Justin. I want you on your feet, not your knees, and I’d rather see you presiding at the seance table than hungry or desperate. I don’t want you to capitulate. I never want you to do that. Merely, I would take it as a very great favour if you’d please, please let me give you back your freedom to choose.”

— K.J. Charles

65. “People create poetry and mustard gas. We invent gods and monsters and gods that might as well be monsters. We act with extraordinary grace and unfathomable cruelty. We’re so terribly intelligent, and dreadfully easy to fool.”

— K.J. Charles

66. “This was the torment and insanity, the enjoyment of angels, when he was helpless in Silas’s hands. “Frighten me,” Dominic whispered.”

— K.J. Charles

67. “Alec, my sweet, you trampled me, Temp, and your family underfoot, and no less effectively because you did it in velvet slippers. I’m genuinely impressed.”

— K.J. Charles

68. “Harry padded softly in. He was in linen shirt, breeches, and bare feet, the very model of a gentleman bent on criminal conversation, and the sight made Julius’s chest heave.”

— K.J. Charles

69. “I know I had to do it: that was why I did it. I don’t stab people by accident.”

— K.J. Charles

70. “What’s it to me which rich man runs the country?”

— K.J. Charles

71. “It is my aim, and would be my privilege, to ruin you for all others for a very long time to come.”

— K.J. Charles

72. “I give him the truth. I don’t ask for his; I give him mine. The shames the fears, the desires. I have made myself vulnerable to him, I have put my soul in his hands, and he has cherished it.”

— K.J. Charles

73. “It does seem unfair that one should have to rethink one’s beliefs at the advanced age of thirty-seven.”

— K.J. Charles

74. “She’d forgotten how overwhelming he could be in his desires, and not just physical ones. When James wanted, he did so powerfully. It was overpowering to be wanted this much.”

— K.J. Charles

75. “One of Miss Marianne Loxleigh’s most admired features, at least by the kind of people who catalogued beauty rather than reacting to it, was her noble and lofty forehead. She usually emphasised it in the way she dressed her hair. Currently she was emphasising it by banging it on the breakfast table.”

— K.J. Charles

76. “I am in the process of nailing Mr. Humphrey Griffin to the wall so thoroughly that future generations will mistake him for a tapestry,...”

— K.J. Charles

77. “Cyprian didn’t shrug – a servant of his calibre would never do such a thing – but his entire demeanor implied a shrug.”

— K.J. Charles

78. “It was hard to keep up the fight for the freedom of your fellow man when your fellow man was a bastard.”

— K.J. Charles

79. “You’re a fool, and I’m another. Between us, we barely make a village idiot.”

— K.J. Charles

80. “It’s one of your most attractive qualities, you know, you never snore. Rare ad precious and – his voice dropped, though they were alone on the platform – sadly underrated in a bed partner.”

— K.J. Charles

81. “But evidently something in the line of his mouth and the set of his shoulders made him seem the sort of man who hurt people, and there were men who liked to be hurt.”

— K.J. Charles

82. “Scars are always beautiful. They’re proof we lived.”

— K.J. Charles

83. “Your friends arrived like a pair of very badly cast fairy godmothers and pulled my feet out of the fire on your behalf.”

— K.J. Charles

84. “I don’t need fidelity, or adoration, or extravagant vows. Those are all will-o’-the-wisps. Whereas good manners require effort.” And so we rode on, talking for all the world as though we were not two murderers in the process of committing treason at a funeral, and I can only say, that is what Ruritania and Rupert Hentzau do to a man.”

— K.J. Charles

85. “They don’t make spectacles for you, do they?” Clem.”

— K.J. Charles

86. “There’s no good doing the right thing unless you stop people doing the wrong thing.”

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

89. “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

90. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

97. “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

98. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles