Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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What's the biggest thing you've zapped with a fireball?' I asked. 'That would be a tiger,'said Nightingale. 'Well don't tell Greenpeace,' I said. 'They're an endagered species.' 'Not that sort of tiger,' said Nightingale. 'A Panzer-kampfwagen sechs Ausf E.' I stared at him. 'You knocked out a Tiger tank with a fireball?' 'Actually I knocked out two,' said Nightingale. 'I have to admit that the first one took three shots, one to disable the tracks, one through the driver's eye slot and one down the commander's hatch - brewed up rather nicely.
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But I wasn't some terrified peasant, I was an apprentice and I had been trained by the man who led the reguard at Ettersberg.
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Fish and chip night was a Kumar family tradition that dated back to when Jaget was courting his wife and they used to meet in the last white English-owned fish and chip shop in Wembley on the basis that none of their relatives would go in there.
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I'd been too intent on the room to hear her coming up the stairs. Leslie said that the capacity not to notice a traditional Dutch folk dancing band walk up behind you was not a survival characteristic in the complex, fast-paced world of the modern policing environment. I'd like to point out that I was trying to give directions to a slightly deaf tourist at the time, and anyway it was a Swedish dance troupe.
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It’s strictly constables, sergeants, and lunatics. We’ll keep the kettle on for you.
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The kitchen was the kind of brushed steel monstrosity that looks more like it's designed to weaponise viruses than cook dinner.
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Under the vaulted arch of its white iron-and-glass roof it was as if IKEA had been hired to refit St. Pancras station. If Thomas the Tank Engine had been Swedish, his living room would have looked just the same.
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Once the telephone had been invented, it was only a matter of time before the police got in on the new technology and, first in Glasgow and then in London, the police box was born. Here a police officer in need of assistance could find a telephone link to Scotland Yard, a dry space to do “paperwork” and, in certain extreme cases, a life of adventure through space and time.
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I had found the upper limit of my courage. Fortunately for me, there is no known lower limit to human stupidity.
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When I was a kid I used to drink from the tap all the time. I'd run back into the flat all hot and sweaty from playing and didn't even bother putting it in a glass, just turned the tap on and stuck my mouth underneath it. If my mom caught me doing it she used to scold me, but my dad just said that I had to be careful. 'What if a fish jumped out?' he used to say. 'You'd swallow it before you knew it was there.' Dad was always saying stuff like that and it wasn't until I was seventeen that I realised it was because he was stoned all the time.
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At the bottom of the box I found part of a map that had been ripped down its centrefold – a 1:40,000 scale depiction of a place called Ootacamund, which turned out on later research to be a British Hill Station in Tamil Nadu. A Hill Station being a place where colonial administrators and the like could use altitude to avoid the oppressive Indian summer heat, since the sensible solution, i.e. abandoning colonialism and moving back to Surrey, obviously never occurred to them.
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To them, fae basically meant anyone who was vaguely magical who hadn’t gone to the right school, with the High Fae being the creatures referenced in medieval literature who dwelled in their own castles with a proper feudal set-up and an inexplicable need to marry virtuous Christian knights.
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In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.
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That which does not kill us has to get up extra early in the morning if it wants to get us next time.
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He threw a fireball at me. I threw a chimney stack at him - that's the London way.
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You know there's always things in life that you have to do despite the fact that you know for certain the outcome is going to be messy, painful, humiliating, or all three.
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Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.
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Dr Walid walked me past the security at reception and introduced me to today's dead body.
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Don’t get me wrong, I like the countryside. In fact, some of my best friends are geographical features.
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Seawoll sat in the executive leather operator’s chair behind the desk wearing a dangerously stretched noddy suit that made him look like the Michelin Man’s slightly deflated older brother.
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The mark was from the glue that once held a folder into which a library card would have fitted back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth and computers were the size of washing machines.
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When you arrive unexpectedly at someone’s house you go in through the front door, often after making sure you’ve got a couple of mates waiting round the back. For a business, especially the kind that involves big trucks and heavy metal, it’s always better to go in through the back. The customer-facing part of any modern business is purposely designed to be as politely unhelpful as possible. If you go in from the rear, the customer-facing staff are all facing the wrong way and everybody starts their conversation on the back foot.
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It gave me “the eye”—the fearsome gaze that sheepdogs use to keep their charges in line. But I gave it “the look”—the stare that policemen use to keep members of the public in a state of randomized guilt.
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At this very moment astronomers are detecting planets around distant stars by measuring how much their orbits wobble and the clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop. The story of how we measure the physical universe is the history of science itself.