Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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Or at least of fending him off for long enough that we can sweep in heroically like the Seventh Cavalry.’ Burning tipis and shooting women and children, I thought.
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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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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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You do magic by learning formae which are like shapes in your mind that have an effect on the physical universe.
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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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Then you throw the bloody thing as far as you can, hopefully outside the area of immediate magical effect, where two minutes later it basically phones the Met control room and screams help, help, serious magic shenanigans here – send help – preferably Nightingale.
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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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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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It’s a good thing that the sheep are all so law abiding.
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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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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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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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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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One Hyde Park squatted next to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel like a stack of office furniture, and with all the elegance and charm of the inside of a photocopier. Albeit a brand new photocopier that doubled as a fax and document scanner.
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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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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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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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So into the woods we went—it was surprisingly noisy. Especially one loud bird whose chirping sounded far too cheerful for the middle of the night.
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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 just warn people, they often simply ignore you. But if you ask them a question, then they have to think about it. And once they start to think about the consequences, they almost always calm down. Unless they're drunk, of course. Or stoned. Or aged between fourteen and twenty-one. Or Glaswegian.
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It’s a truism in policing that witnesses and statements are fine, but nothing beats empirical physical evidence. Actually it isn’t a truism because most policemen think the word ‘empirical’ is something to do with Darth Vader, but it damn well should be.
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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.