Top 140 K.J. Charles Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

103. “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

104. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

106. “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

107. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

115. “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

116. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “They did not understand. They thought of Cyprian as a servant when he had been so much more. He.”

— K.J. Charles

123. “Who the hell came armed to rob a bookshop?”

— K.J. Charles

124. “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

125. “I am Jonah, therefore I love Ben.”

— K.J. Charles

126. “I see. Things must be bad if you’re voluntarily telling me the truth.”

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

128. “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

129. “Two death sentences? Really? I mean, you look very well, considering.”

— K.J. Charles

130. “He wished he had words for what Kim was, the aching pain and the starlight, the beauty and the ugliness.”

— K.J. Charles

131. “If it helps,” James said, “most of the underworld is terrified of you. I certainly am.”

— K.J. Charles

132. “In writing Simon’s stories, I have written myself out of my own life.”

— K.J. Charles

133. “He was watching me under those drooping lids, with need and satisfaction too, much as if he imagined he had the whip hand of me now. That was his youth showing, the peculiar conviction that a hard prick is a source of power rather than a vulnerability, not to say a weakness.”

— K.J. Charles

134. “But Kim had wanted him anyway, and he’d fought accordingly, until he got it through Will’s thick skull that it was time to stop seeing where they went and start heading there on purpose.”

— K.J. Charles

135. “Of course I’ve got a conscience,” Jonah said. “He’s sitting right here next to me.”

— K.J. Charles

136. “He’d spent his life carefully not looking into an abyss of rage like the pit of hellfire he’d so often been told awaited pagans, because if he ever really looked, he feared he might be angry forever.”

— K.J. Charles

137. “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

138. “Men could rant and rave all they chose; if a woman did the same, she showed herself a slave to her emotions.”

— K.J. Charles

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles