Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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When the Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812, the British, in time-honoured fashion, abandoned their allies. Who were subsequently wiped out by the Americans along with any other tribes that happened to be in the same general vicinity – even those that had actually been allied with the US government during the war. It’s exactly this sort of thing, of course, which gives colonialism a bad name.
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I didn't think that Herefordshire Social Services would be best pleased about me dumping a poorly socialised pre-teen with mind control powers on them.
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I don’t know why Nightingale was so surprised—I barely knew four and a half spells and you couldn’t have got me to give it up, and that’s despite close brushes with death by vampire, hanging, malignant spirit, riot, tigerman, and the ever-present risk of overdoing the magic and getting a brain aneurysm.
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Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, I thought. For they are soggy and hard to light.
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It took the Fire Brigade a day and a half to secure the remains of the house enough to recover Crew Cut’s body, which was described by Dr Jennifer Vaughan as ‘suffering from crush trauma’ and by Dr Walid as ‘mostly flat’.
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The media response to unusual weather is as ritualized and predictable as the stages of grief. First comes denial: "I can't believe there's so much snow." Then anger: "Why can't I drive my car, why are the trains not running?" Then blame: "Why haven't the local authorities sanded the roads, where are the snowplows, and how come the Canadians can deal with this and we can't?" This last stage goes on the longest and tends to trail off into a mumbled grumbling moan, enlivened by occasional ILLEGALS ATE MY SNOWPLOW headlines from the *Daily Mail....*
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Round and round and round we go and where we stop nobody knows.
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We seem to be sitting around waiting for the next fucking disaster, which went into the official log as - DCI Seawoll felt that our operational posture was too reactive.
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Even in these days of eBay and superencrypted anonymous purchasing over the Internet, the safest way to buy stolen stuff is to meet a total stranger and hand over a wedge of untraceable cash. They don't know you, you don't know them - the only problem is where to meet.
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Caratacus suffered the double indignity of being taken to Rome in chains and having an opera written about him by Elgar.
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People don't like to speak ill of the dead even when they're monsters, let alone when they're loved ones. People like to forget any bad things that someone did and why should they remember?
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I saw a dark void under the platform and had just enough time to think: "Fuck me he's a earthbender.”
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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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It’s a good thing that the sheep are all so law abiding.
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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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I took the swab using the collection kit that I’d borrowed from Dominic who, I realized, had left the Boy Scout scale behind and was now verging on Batman levels of crazy preparedness.
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The rest of the band faded down to almost nothing while my dad did his best Bill Evans impression — except hopefully without the untreated hepatitis.
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I texted Nightingale to let him know our change in disposition and then I picked up my Pliny, because nothing says stuck all alone in your flat like a Roman know-it-all.
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But as the wise man said, life’s too short to drink bad wine. Regret is a terrible vintage.
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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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If you ask any copper why they stick at a job which exposes them to abuse from everyone from petty criminals all the way down to government ministers, they’ll say it’s the variety.
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That’s how real men settle their differences, through reasoned discussion and a dispassionate analysis. He farted as I reached the inner door, a sign, I decided, of his respect.
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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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In 1666, following an unfortunate workplace accident, the city of London burnt down.