Ben Aaronovitch Quotes

Here's a comforting thought for you, Peter,' he said. 'However long you may live, the world will never lose its ability to surprise you with its beauty.

On the plus side, there were no rioters in sight but on the minus side this was probably because everywhere I looked was on fire.

(A)ny working hypothesis was probably going to involve quantum theory at some point - the part of physics that made my brains trickle out of my ears.

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

I had found the upper limit of my courage. Fortunately for me, there is no known lower limit to human stupidity.

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'.

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.

If there was ever a candidate to be patron saint of computers then it would be Alan Turing. Mathematician, war hero and tragic victim of homophobia.

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.

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. Alexander

Conflict resolution,' said Nightingale. 'Is this what they teach at Hendon these days?'
'Yes, sir,' I said. 'But don't worry, they also teach us how to beat people with phone books and the ten best ways to plant evidence.

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 ... *

My milkshake brings all the gods to the yard.

He called it potentia because there's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you're making it up as you go along.

Well, our victim had a thirst for knowledge," said Stephanopoulos. "He was a student at St. Martins College.

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. And

A romantic," said Nightingale much, much later. "The most dangerous people on Earth.

There's a goddess of the river," I said. "Yes - Mother Thames," he said patiently. "And there's a god of the river - Father Thames." "Are they related?" "No," he said. "And that's part of the problem." "Are they really gods?" "I never worry about the theological questions," said Nightingale. "They exist, they have power and they can breach the Queen's Peace - that makes them a police matter." A

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.

This is your brain on magic.

Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It's not your garden, it's not a park - it's a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer's plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.

When dealing with the excessively rich and privileged, you've got your two basic approaches. One is to go in hard and deliberately working class. A regional accent is always a plus in this. Seawoll has been known to deploy a Mancunian dialect so impenetrable that members of Oasis would have needed subtitles, and graduate entries with double firsts from Oxford practise a credible Estuary in the mirror and drop their glottals with gay abandon when necessary.

That approach only works if the subject suffers from residual middle-class guilt – unfortunately the properly posh, the nouveau riche and senior legal professionals are rarely prey to such weaknesses. For them you have to go in obliquely and with maximum Downton Abbey.

Fortunately for us we have just the man.

Jeremy Beaumont-Jones had been lucky enough to be born rich. He wasn't in the mad oligarch class but once you're past a certain point, the sheer weight of your money sucks in wealth like a financial singularity. If you're sensible enough not to blow it on race horses, cocaine or musical theatre, then it becomes a perpetual-motion money making machine.

I may be a city boy, but I'm fairly certain that the greasy purple and red squishy bits are supposed to stay inside the sheep and not be sprayed across a surprisingly large area.
"Animal attack?" I asked.

Officially she was there to liaise with me on the case, but really she was there for the wide-screen TV, takeaways and the unresolved sexual tension.

He was transparent, the way holograms in films are transparent.Three dimensional, definitely really there and fucking ... transparent.

In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart.

I was tempted to tell her it was because we were British and actually had a sense of humour, but I try not to be cruel to foreigners, especially when they're that strung out.

Fuck me,' I said to Toby. 'We're living in Isengard.

I gave the prescribed Metropolitan Police "first greeting".
"Oi!" I said "What do you think you're doing?

Boss,' I said into my Airwave. 'It's getting needlessly metaphysical out here.

I don't mind getting drunk, but there always comes a moment in the evening when I find myself watching myself bumping into things and thinking - I'm bored of this, can I have full control of my brain back, please?

In some households you only have to turn up three times before you're expected to make your own tea, draw up a chair in front of the telly and call the cat a bastard.

He'd obviously wanted to tell someone about it for a long time and I was a convenient ear. I get that a lot. Stephanopoulos calls it my secret weapon. "It's that vacant expression," she said, "people just want to fill the empty void".

The railway hit Harrow on the Hill in 1880 and it's been downhill ever since, culminating in one of those formless red brick shopping centres which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built. As a result, your average shopper has only to spend ten minutes inside to be reduced to a state of quiet desperation. Primark has the right idea, being right by the entrance so that fleeing punters would grab the closest approximation to whatever it was they wanted before running screaming into the night. I'm

You don't actually know enough about me to insult me properly.

You put a spell on the dog," I said as we left the house.
"Just a small one," said Nightingale.
"So magic is real," I said. "Which makes you a ... what?"
"A wizard."
"Like Harry Potter?"
Nightingale sighed. "No," he said. "Not like Harry Potter."
"In what way?"
"I'm not a fictional character," said Nightingale.

You shouldn't make jokes about these things," she said. "Science doesn't have all the answers, you know."
"It's got all the best questions, though,

Ghosts, I was thinking, memories - I wasn't sure there was a difference.

As I stepped onto the gloomy landing a word formed in my mind: two syllables, starts with a V and rhymes with dire. I froze in place. Nightingale said that everything was true, after a fashion, and that had to include vampires, didn't it? I doubted they were anything like they were in books and on TV, and one thing was for certain - they absolutely weren't going to sparkle in the sunlight.

He threw a fireball at me. I threw a chimney stack at him - that's the London way.

If you find yourself talking to the police, my advice is to stay calm but look guilty; it's your safest bet.

If you ask any police officer what the worst part of the job is, they will always say breaking bad news to relatives, but this is not the truth. The worst part is staying in the room after you've broken the news, so that you're forced to be there when someone's life disintegrates around them. Some people say it doesn't bother them - such people are not to be trusted.

But . . ." Dominic floundered around for a bit before pointing at me accusingly. "You said that there's weird shit, but it normally turns out to have a rational explanation."
"It does," said Beverley. "The explanation is a wizard did it.

You never said you used to play Dungeon and Dragons, Lesley had said when I explained my reasoning. I'd been tempted to tell her that I was thirteen at the time, and anyway it was Call of Cthulhu, but I've learned from bitter experience that such remarks generally only make things worse.

I don't like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers.

My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner.

I woke in the hour before dawn, stuck in that strange state where the memory of your dreams is still powerful enough to motivate your actions.

I left in a hurry before he could change his mind, but I want to make it clear that at no point did I break into a skip

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.

I wasn't sure I found that particularly reassuring, but in the event of an attack I wasn't going to be as much use as Thomas 'Oh sorry, was that your Tiger Tank?' Nightingale.

Or as my dad always says: it only becomes a social problem when the working man joins in.

He's been banned,' said Lesley. 'Until he passes the advanced driver's course.' 'Is that because you crashed that ambulance into the river?' asked Abigail.

One of the first rules of police work is that trouble will always come looking for you, so there's no point looking for it.

Are there rules?'
'No gods, no staffs, first man to stay down for the count loses and we suspend the contest if the building collapses.'
- on magical duels

But Smithy," said Stephanopoulis. "I don't believe in respectable businessmen. I've been a copper for more than five minutes. And the constable here doesn't think you're respectable either, because it happens he is a card-carrying member of the Workers' Revolutionary Party and so regards all forms of property as a crime against the proletariat." That one caught me by surprise and the best I could manage was "Power to the people.

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.

The Fire Brigade recognise only two kinds of people at a fire, victims and obstacles, and if you don't want to be either it's best to stay back.

What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata, a physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees.

The kitchen was the kind of brushed steel monstrosity that looks more like it's designed to weaponise viruses than cook dinner.

Vikings," said Lesley. "Precisely," said Nightingale. "Bloodthirsty, but surprisingly erudite in a limited fashion." Well

It had a long and varied history, mostly involving crime, prostitution and the theater,

I did feel a 'something', like a catch in the silence at the moment of creation.

When I was a kid I used to drink from the tap all the time. I'd run back into the flat all hot and sweaty from playing and didn't even bother putting it in a glass, just turned the tap on and stuck my mouth underneath it. If my mom caught me doing it she used to scold me, but my dad just said that I had to be careful. 'What if a fish jumped out?' he used to say. 'You'd swallow it before you knew it was there.' Dad was always saying stuff like that and it wasn't until I was seventeen that I realised it was because he was stoned all the time.

We'd considered wearing uniform but Lesley said, what with her mask and everything, she'd look like a plastic cop monster from Doctor Who. I managed to restrain myself from telling her their real name.

You have to call me Master." "Master?" "That's the tradition," said Nightingale. I said the word in my head and it kept on coming out massa.

The main purpose of an administrative meeting is to establish collective guilt for whatever fuck-up arises out of its decisions. That

The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse [...] stuck in my mind because of the subject's flagrant health and safety violation. As any competent practitioner will tell you, you always complete your protective circle *before* you start your workings.

I was pleased to see that even back in the glory days of the Folly people left their mugs of tea on their magical textbooks.

There was also a great absence of people, including behind the mahogany-topped reception desk. Now, there's a time when an unlocked premises is a positive boon to a police officer as in – I was just looking to ascertain the whereabouts of the proprietor when I stumbled across the Class A controlled substances which were in plain sight in the bottom drawer of a locked desk in an upstairs office, M'lord.

With a grunt he levered himself to his feet, causing the chair to bang against the bookcase behind him and set the various objet d'bollocks rattling.

insouciance. But there's just something uniquely intimidating about

A London copper doesn't like to intrude upon a traveller camp with anything less than a van full of bodies in riot gear - it's considered disrespectful otherwise.

Why would a young man like you be interested in history?"
"So I can avoid repeating it."
"Then stay away from men who talk about the fatherland," he said. "That's my advice.

My mum translated this in her head to "witchfinder," which was good because like most West Africans, she considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman.

I saw a dark void under the platform and had just enough time to think: Fuck me he's a earthbender.

There's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact that you're making it up as you go along.

Pictures of Cheam adorn the walls of planning offices of every Home County to serve as an awful warning.

Sinister is Latin for 'left', making it the sort of enjoyable schoolboy pun that is such an advert for mixed-gender education.

Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.

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.

Because were were both probationary constables, an experienced PC had been left to supervise us - a responsibility he diligently pursued from an all-night cafe on St. Martin's Close.

The study of the victim is called victimology because everything sounds better with and ology tacked on the end.

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

What's the biggest thing you've zapped with a fireball?' I asked.
'That would be a tiger,'said Nightingale.
'Well don't tell Greenpeace,' I said. 'They're an endagered species.'
'Not that sort of tiger,' said Nightingale. 'A Panzer-kampfwagen sechs Ausf E.'
I stared at him. 'You knocked out a Tiger tank with a fireball?'
'Actually I knocked out two,' said Nightingale. 'I have to admit that the first one took three shots, one to disable the tracks, one through the driver's eye slot and one down the commander's hatch - brewed up rather nicely.

Urban Outfitters, eh," said Beverley. "That explains the Dr Denim shirt."
"My mum bought me that," I said.
"And you think that's less embarrassing?

but the first rule about a black woman's hair is you don't talk about a black woman's hair. And the second rule is you don't ever touch a black woman's hair without getting written permission first. And that includes after sex, marriage, or death for that matter. This courtesy is not reciprocated.

The laws of thermodynamics were very clear on the subject – all debts must be paid in full.

One thing for certain, Abigail who lived up the road was going on my watch list. In fact I was going to create a watch list just so I could put Abigail at the top of it.

The general public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you've generated some sort of lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life - like drinking and sleeping, and if you're lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice.

This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly. Sucks to be you, quadruped. Opposable thumbs - don't leave home without them.

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.

The evening was still warm enough for shirtsleeves, and the city was clinging to summer like a wannabe trophy wife to a promising center forward.

Ethically challenged magical practitioners," I said.

It's strictly constables, sergeants, and lunatics. We'll keep the kettle on for you.

History happens," said the Doctor. "Even when I'm not around."

"Only by accident," said Kadiatu...

Despite what you think you know, most people don't want to fight, especially when evenly matched. ... 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.

From then on, it was even twistier B-roads through a country so photgenically rural that I half expected to meet Bilbo Baggins around the next corner - providing he'd taken to driving a Nissan Micra.

You do magic by learning formae which are like shapes in your mind that have an effect on the physical universe.

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.