Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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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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That’s because they don’t know. It’s like economics. Everybody’s got a theory, and some people make it their religion.
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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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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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Actually I'd always thought he sat in the library with a slim volume of metaphysical poetry until the commissioner called him on the bat phone and summoned him into action. Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.
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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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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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Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, I thought. For they are soggy and hard to light.
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It had a long and varied history, mostly involving crime, prostitution and the theater.
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Most people don’t want to fight, especially when evenly matched. A mob will tear an individual to pieces and a man with a gun and a noble cause is happy to kill ever so many women and children, but risking a fair fight—not so easy. That’s why you see those pissed young men doing the dance of “don’t hold me back” while desperately hoping someone likes them enough to hold them back.
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As property prices started rising, developers snatched up bomb sites and derelict buildings and erected the shapeless concrete lumps that have made the ’70s the shining beacon of architectural splendor that it is.
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This book is dedicated to all the people who get up and do something about it, whatever “it” is and however small the thing it is they do.
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Perhaps, I thought, the dead god gets folded into the existence of the new god, the way a dormant genetic variation can exist within an organism’s DNA—hanging about like an actor’s understudy until the right environmental conditions give it expression and—hey presto—suddenly a bacteria is heat resistant, our Chloe gets her big break on Broadway and a sniper for hire gets an unexpected half a meter of cold steel through the chest. Perhaps
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From the individual infantryman’s point of view there really is no such thing as too much personal firepower.
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The Folly had last been refurbished in the 1930s when the British establishment firmly believed that central heating was the work, if not of the devil per se, then definitely evil foreigners bent on weakening the hardy British spirit.
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We can't have your people fighting each other," I said. The 'royal we' is very important in police work; it reminds the person you're talking to that behind you stands the mighty institution that is the Metropolitan Police, robed in the full majesty of the law and capable, in manpower terms, of invading a small country. You only hope when you're using that term that the whole edifice is currently facing in the same direction as you are.
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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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Good at his job, I guessed, but probably not at ease with things that fall outside his comfort zone. He was going to love us.
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That which does not kill us does not kill us.
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There’s always a secret door. That’s why you always need a thief in your party.
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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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I didn't ask why anybody would want to risk the electric two-step on the tracks because, as police, all three of us knew that there wasn't anything so stupid that somebody wouldn't try it sooner or later.
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Fuck me, I thought. I can do magic.