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

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

— K.J. Charles

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

108. “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

109. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

121. “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

122. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

130. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

134. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

139. “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

140. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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