Top 140 K.J. Charles Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

106. “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

107. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

133. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

140. “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

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

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

— K.J. Charles

144. “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