Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
-
I woke in the hour before dawn, stuck in that strange state where the memory of your dreams is still powerful enough to motivate your actions.
-
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
-
From the individual infantryman’s point of view there really is no such thing as too much personal firepower.
-
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.
-
I headed over the river to the address listed on Mr Wilkinson's driving licence to see whether there was anyone who loved him enough to kill him.
-
There are people who have been touched by, let’s call it for the sake of argument, magic to the point where they’re no longer entirely people even under human rights legislation. Nightingale calls them the fae but that’s a catch-all term like the way the Greeks used the word “barbarian” or the Daily Mail uses “Europe.”
-
Perhaps, I thought, the dead god gets folded into the existence of the new god, the way a dormant genetic variation can exist within an organism’s DNA—hanging about like an actor’s understudy until the right environmental conditions give it expression and—hey presto—suddenly a bacteria is heat resistant, our Chloe gets her big break on Broadway and a sniper for hire gets an unexpected half a meter of cold steel through the chest. Perhaps
-
Ghosts, I was thinking, memories - I wasn't sure there was a difference.
-
Which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built.
-
Missing kids are tough cases. I mean, murder is bad but at least the worst has already happened to the victim—they’re not going to get any deader. Missing kids come with a literal deadline, made worse by the fact that you don’t get to learn the timing until it’s too late.
-
That which does not kill us does not kill us.
-
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.
-
I ended up learning magic because you can’t trust the British to keep to an agreement over the long term.
-
Zach looked at Carey in consternation, obviously wondering if we were using the rare good cop/loony cop interrogation technique.
-
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.
-
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.
-
That’s the nature of the beast. We are what we are.
-
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.
-
In home furnishing terms, past a certain point, more money doesn’t get you anything except an increase in insurance premiums.
-
As Martin noted, to the detectives 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. Instead, with the slow methodical patience of the drunk and terrified, Martin Turner dialed 999 and asked for the police.
-
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.
-
First law of gossip - there's no point knowing something if somebody else doesn't know you know it.
-
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.
-
I’d found a seventeenth-century map of the rivers of London.