Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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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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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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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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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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I’d been warned in advance, so I’d given it some thought. When it was my turn and I stood up and called for life, liberty and peace and managed to sit down before I added a hard-boiled egg to the list.
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I’m working on several theories,” I said. “But I’m currently favoring the hypothesis that the moon has a seemingly arbitrary effect on magic because it likes to piss me off.” “That’s a theory with a high degree of applicability to other spheres of life,” he said. “Yes it is,” I said, and we spontaneously fist
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In home furnishing terms, past a certain point, more money doesn’t get you anything except an increase in insurance premiums.
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Archway is where the post-war dream of the urban motorway died in the teeth of local opposition and the inability of the designers to answer basic traffic management questions.
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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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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 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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This is why magic is worse even than quantum physics. Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I've never yet had a Higgs bosun turn up and try to have a conversation with me.
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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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I’d found a seventeenth-century map of the rivers of London.
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I showed her my warrant card, and she stared at it in confusion. You get that about half the time, mainly because most members of the public have never seen a warrant card close up and have no idea what the hell it is.
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The world was different before the war. We didn't have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place - we still dreamed of secret caves in the Mountains of the Moon, and tiger hunting in the Punjab.
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So Newton, like all good seventeenth-century intellectuals, wrote in Latin because that was the international language of science, philosophy and, I found out later, upmarket pornography.
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I've already told the police what happened, they didn't believe me. Why should you.
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That which does not kill us does not kill us.
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This is a speech we've all heard before. From the con artists who aren't like the burglars, who aren't like the armed robbers, who only ever broke a bone if the victim had it coming and the murderers who made 'one mistake' and are forced to pay for it for the rest of their lives. They want to know what you're doing about the real criminals, the rapists and the paedophiles. Who want to know why you're wasting resources on them when we should be tackling female genital mutilation or political corruption.
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Right from the start Abigail used to moan and fidget as her hair was relaxed or braided or thermally reconditioned, but her dad was determined that his child wasn’t going to embarrass him in public. That all stopped when Abigail turned eleven and calmly announced that she had ChildLine on speed‑dial and the next person who came near her with a hair extension, chemical straightener, or, God forbid, a hot comb, was going to end up explaining their actions to Social Services.
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The main purpose of an administrative meeting is to establish collective guilt for whatever fuck-up arises out of its decisions.
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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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There’s nothing like having your girlfriend talk in geological time to make you feel insignificant.