Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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Good at his job, I guessed, but probably not at ease with things that fall outside his comfort zone. He was going to love us.
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From the individual infantryman’s point of view there really is no such thing as too much personal firepower.
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As Martin noted, to the detective conducting his interview, it was a good thing he'd been inebriated, because otherwise he would have wasted time screaming and running about- especially once he realized he was standing in a pool of blood.
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I saw a dark void under the platform and had just enough time to think: "Fuck me he's a earthbender.”
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The railway hit Harrow on the Hill in 1880 and it’s been downhill ever since, culminating in one of those formless red brick shopping centres which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built. As a result, your average shopper has only to spend ten minutes inside to be reduced to a state of quiet desperation. Primark has the right idea, being right by the entrance so that fleeing punters would grab the closest approximation to whatever it was they wanted before running screaming into the night. I’m
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We were suffering a standard gray London drizzle, the sort that makes it clear that it can keep it up all day if needs be.
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That’s the nature of the beast. We are what we are.
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When the government decided that in the light of an increased security threat what London really needed was a smaller police force.
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Normally the police like to turn up nice and early, preferably around 6 a.m., because not only are people liable to be actually at home but that early in the morning they’re rarely playing with a full deck. Today we were going in Sunday lunchtime because we weren’t looking for shock and awe but aiming for sinister and creepy instead.
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We can't have your people fighting each other," I said. The 'royal we' is very important in police work; it reminds the person you're talking to that behind you stands the mighty institution that is the Metropolitan Police, robed in the full majesty of the law and capable, in manpower terms, of invading a small country. You only hope when you're using that term that the whole edifice is currently facing in the same direction as you are.
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In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart.
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Tolkien and my dad had weirdly convergent ideas about the musical nature of the universe, although my dad would probably have been more forgiving of Melkor’s improvisation. You know, providing it didn’t step on his solo.
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That which does not kill us does not kill us.
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So that's when I came up with the most ridiculous plan since I'd decided to take a witness statement from a ghost. It was a plan so stupid that even Baldrick would have rejected it out of hand.
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Here's a comforting thought for you, Peter,' he said. 'However long you may live, the world will never lose its ability to surprise you with its beauty.
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This book is dedicated to all the people who get up and do something about it, whatever “it” is and however small the thing it is they do.
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Zach Palmer, who was half human and half—we weren’t really sure what, including the possibility that the other half might be human as well.
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The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated -- that's the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don't get a lot of practical experience.
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He was calling it an atonic seizure because, even if he didn't know why it had happened, it was important to give it a cool name.
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Which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built.
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The general public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you've generated some sort of lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life - like drinking and sleeping, and if you're lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice.
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Ghosts, I was thinking, memories - I wasn't sure there was a difference.
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Apparently after six days baking pigs and herding bricks, the inhabitants would kick back with a spot of cock-fighting, bullbaiting, and ratting. It was the sort of place an adventurous gentleman might venture only if he didn’t mind being beaten, rolled, and catching an exciting venereal disease.
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Bollocks, I thought, or testiculi or possibly testiculos if we were using the accusative.