Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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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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It's important for a man to know his limitations, and my limitations started at moving to Peckham and hanging around with yardies, postcode wannabes and those weird, skinny white kids who don't get the irony in Eminem.
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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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Zach Palmer, who was half human and half—we weren’t really sure what, including the possibility that the other half might be human as well.
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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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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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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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The British have always been madly overambitious, and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight.
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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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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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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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Absence of evidence, as any good archeologist will tell you, is not the same as evidence of absence.
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he had the startled-rabbit look that civilians get after five minutes of helping the police with their inquiries. If they stay calm for too long it’s a sign that they’re professional villains or foreign or just plain stupid. All of which can get you locked up if you’re not careful. If you find yourself talking to the police, my advice is to stay calm but look guilty; it’s your safest bet.
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It had a long and varied history, mostly involving crime, prostitution and the theater.
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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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As a typical Londoner, Gurcan had a high tolerance for random thoughtlessness; after all, if you live in the big city there's no point complaining that it's a big city, but even that tolerance has its limit and the name of that limit is 'taking the piss'.
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As Martin noted, to the detectives conducting his interview, it was a good thing he'd been inebriated, because otherwise he would have wasted time screaming and running about - especially once he realized he was standing in a pool of blood. Instead, with the slow methodical patience of the drunk and terrified, Martin Turner dialed 999 and asked for the police.
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He was sure that police box hadn’t been there before.
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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 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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This is why magic is worse even than quantum physics. Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I've never yet had a Higgs bosun turn up and try to have a conversation with me.
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Fuck me, I thought. I can do magic.
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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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We were aiming for a cross between Kafka and Orwell, which just goes to show how dangerous it can be when your police officers are better read than you are.