Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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Not being invited in is one of the boxes on the “suspicious behavior” bingo form that every copper carries around in their head along with “stupidly overpowerful dog” and being too quick to supply an alibi. Fill all the boxes and you too could win an all-expenses-paid visit to your local police station.
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Somebody doesn't know they're not in Kansas anymore,' said Stephanopoulos.
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My dad once told me that the secret to a happy life was never to start something with a girl unless you were willing to follow wherever it led. It's the best piece of advice he has ever given me, and probably the reason I was born.
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A romantic," said Nightingale much, much later. "The most dangerous people on Earth.
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NOBODY LIKES a riot except looters and journalists. The Metropolitan Police, being the go-ahead and dynamic modern police service that it is, has any number of contingency plans for dealing with civil disturbance. From farmers with truckloads of manure to suburban anarchists on a weekend break and Saturday jihadists. What I suspect they didn’t have plans for was just over two thousand enraged opera lovers pouring out of the Royal Opera House and going on a mad rampage through Covent Garden.
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On the plus side, there were no rioters in sight but on the minus side this was probably because everywhere I looked was on fire.
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Peter Grant. Recent arrival, slacker and man of very little fame.
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The laws of thermodynamics were very clear on the subject – all debts must be paid in full.
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Kumar and I ended up stuffing tissue paper up our nostrils, but agreed that if we had to come down again more drastic action would be justified - like amputation.
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But risking a fair fight – not so easy. That’s why you see those pissed young men doing the dance of the ‘don’t hold me back’ while desperately hoping someone likes them enough to hold them back.
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But the first rule about a black woman’s hair is you don’t talk about a black woman’s hair. And the second rule is you don’t ever touch a black woman’s hair without getting written permission first. And that includes after sex, marriage, or death for that matter. This courtesy is not reciprocated.
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He was a Parisian. You can never be sure what Parisians believe in – beyond Paris of course.
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Sinister is Latin for 'left', making it the sort of enjoyable schoolboy pun that is such an advert for mixed-gender education.
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He called it potentia because there's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you're making it up as you go along.
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THE METROPOLITAN Police has a very straightforward approach to murder investigations. Not for them the detective’s gut instinct or the intricate logical deductions of the sleuth savant. No, what the Met likes to do is throw a shitload of manpower at the problem and run down every single possible lead until it is exhausted, the murderer is caught, or the senior investigating officer dies of old age. As a result, murder investigations are conducted not by quirky Detective Inspectors with drink/relationship/mental problems but a bunch of frighteningly ambitious Detective Constables in the first mad flush of their careers.
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The study of the victim is called victimology because everything sounds better with and ology tacked on the end.
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I was tempted to tell her it was because we were British and actually had a sense of humour, but I try not to be cruel to foreigners, especially when they're that strung out.
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He farted as I reached the inner door as a sign, I decided, of his respect.
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A sudden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policemen of a certain rank and age; it’s like a normal midlife crisis, only with more chandeliers and foreign languages.
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By this point I was eager to emulate Guleed and merge unobtrusively with the imitation French farmhouse fittet cupboard and counter unit behind me.
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I heard a woman scream with rage and frustration and then grunt like a tennis player.
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When it’s still—when it’s the cellar of a house, or a ring of mushrooms in a forest or a gun emplacement outside Offenburg—it’s called one of two things. If it remains static and unchanging then we call it a despair. If it seeks to extend its influence then it is a malignancy. Or as the Director puts it—a despair will suck you in, but a malignancy is coming to get you.
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It's a sad fact of modern life that sooner or later you will end up on YouTube doing something stupid. The trick, according to my dad, is to make a fool of yourself to the best of your ability.
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Most people react this way when I tell them about the Nazis. Would it be more or less comforting if we could attribute that particular part of our history to the supernatural?