Ben Aaronovitch Quotes

A promise is a promise, or as Nightingale put it, “either your word is good or it’s worthless.”

Are you smarter than me?"
"I'll answer that when you give me a working definition of intelligence.

The scope of your ignorance, Peter," said Seawoll, "is truly frightening.

I've loaded this particular gun with scrap iron," she said. "Now, I don't know if a shot to the head will kill you or not. But just consider how much fun we can have finding out.

Not your type?"
"I'm strictly a case by case kind of guy. But if I had a type it wouldn't be him.

This guy [Security Guard] was in a navy suit with an unfortunate orange tie, and was nearing us with the caution of a man on a minimum wage zero hours contract who planned to give his employers exactly what they paid for.

“Unless you believe it was a coincidence that Melvin the Rat turned up at a party we were hosting.”
Actually I thought it probably was, but I found that when people are nursing a grievance it’s a waste of time trying to explain the ubiquitous nature of coincidence in the universe. People always want things to happen for a reason.

My recent experience trying to explain magic to people who really would rather it didn’t exist has given me an arsenal of euphemisms. I’m particularly proud of “initial incident” although “subjective perception threshold” runs a close second.

My hand was shaking a little and the pin proved harder to pull than I expected—I guess that’s a safety feature on a grenade.

It’s a bland box of a building built in the 1970s; it was considered to be so lacking in architectural merit that there was talk of listing it so that it could be preserved for posterity as an awful warning.

Nightingale says that conspiracies of silence are the only kind of conspiracies that stand the test of time.

“That’s assuming that the Singularity hasn’t already happened,” said Victor. “And we’re not sentient virtual personalities inhabiting a simulation of reality.”
“How would we know?” I said.

I looked at Lesley—surely nobody could really be that stupid? She shrugged. Lesley has a much lower opinion of humanity than I do.

He did some drugs at university," I said. "Isn't that what it's for?

You don’t get to be a senior investigating officer unless you have a degree in skepticism, an MA in distrust and your CV lists suspicious bastard under your hobbies.