Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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It’s a good thing that the sheep are all so law abiding.
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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.
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Fuck me, I thought. I can do magic.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.”
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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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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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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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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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That’s the nature of the beast. We are what we 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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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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That which does not kill us does not kill us.
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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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Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest, I'm not a country person. I don't like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.
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Bollocks, I thought, or testiculi or possibly testiculos if we were using the accusative.