Top 140 K.J. Charles Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Of course I’ve got a conscience,” Jonah said. “He’s sitting right here next to me.”

— K.J. Charles

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “He had rid my inherited house of a lustful ghost, opened my eyes to a concealed world of strange forces and arcane knowledge, and buggered me twice.”

— K.J. Charles

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

62. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “Not much. I’ve very little imagination. It’s the imaginative chaps who suffer.” “’The coward dies a thousand deaths.”

— K.J. Charles

72. “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

73. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

82. “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

83. “Marry me.” “What? No! Go away.”

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

86. “Right. Put some coffee on while I think about this. I’m in dire need.” Merrick gave him a look. “You can’t work the stove, can you?” “I’m the eighth Earl Crane and the twelfth Viscount Fortunegate. I don’t have to work the stove.” “Two extra names and you can’t lift your arms any more. Bloody lucky they didn’t make you a duke too or you’d forget how to brush your own teeth.”

— K.J. Charles

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “Will shrugged. “I’ll be voting Labour if this election comes about, and higher taxes and redistribution of wealth sound like good things to me. But I don’t like bombs, or blowing up civilians.”

— K.J. Charles

98. “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

99. “He wore spiked knuckledusters that got you an extra year of gaol time right off, and looked purely murderous.”

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles