Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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He was sure that police box hadn’t been there before.
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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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The night may be dark and full of terrors, I thought, but I've got a big stick.
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Even in the 1980s your average young archaeologist would have had difficulty raising capital for a house. I knew this because it’s one of the things archaeologists will tell you about, at length, at the slightest provocation.
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Round and round and round we go and where we stop nobody knows.
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The majestic equality of the law forbids rich and poor alike from pissing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread.
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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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I showed her my warrant card, and she stared at it in confusion. You get that about half the time, mainly because most members of the public have never seen a warrant card close up and have no idea what the hell it is.
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I wanted to say that lots of things weren't in the libraries of the wise, including plate tectonics, molecular biology and the complete works of J. K. Rowling, but she'd probably say that I was missing the point.
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Missing kids are tough cases. I mean, murder is bad but at least the worst has already happened to the victim—they’re not going to get any deader. Missing kids come with a literal deadline, made worse by the fact that you don’t get to learn the timing until it’s too late.
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Which meant I spent my spare time learning theory, studying dead languages and reading books like Essays on The Metaphysical by John "never saw a polysyllabic word he didn't like" Cartwright.
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It's a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something, but some members of the public are more guilty than others.
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I’m working on several theories,” I said. “But I’m currently favoring the hypothesis that the moon has a seemingly arbitrary effect on magic because it likes to piss me off.” “That’s a theory with a high degree of applicability to other spheres of life,” he said. “Yes it is,” I said, and we spontaneously fist
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Even at ten o’clock in the morning it was going to be full of members of the public. Rich, influential members of the public, many of them foreign, a lot of them with some level of diplomatic immunity. ‘What I’m saying here,’ Seawoll had said, ‘is try to limit the amount of damage you do to none fucking whatsoever.’ I don’t know where I got this reputation for property damage, I really don’t.
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For a certain generation of African immigrants cleaning offices became part of the culture like male circumcision and supporting Arsenal.
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Being a seasoned Londoner, Martin gave the body the ‘London once-over’ – a quick glance to determine whether this was a drunk, a crazy or a human being in distress. The fact that it was entirely possible for someone to be all three simultaneously is why good-Samaritanism in London is considered an extreme sport – like base-jumping or crocodile-wrestling.
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It’s not like me and Lesley are inconspicuous. Nightingale had winced, as he always does, at my incorrect use of the accusative pronoun but I think I’m beginning to wear him down.
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You know, your species humans has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity in trying to destroy itself.
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Archway is where the post-war dream of the urban motorway died in the teeth of local opposition and the inability of the designers to answer basic traffic management questions.
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It had a long and varied history, mostly involving crime, prostitution and the theater.
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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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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 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 world was different before the war. We didn't have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place - we still dreamed of secret caves in the Mountains of the Moon, and tiger hunting in the Punjab.