Ben Aaronovitch Quotes

He didn’t have “instincts”, he had thirty years of experience—which was much more reliable.

But this was the eighteenth century, when life was cheap and ambition unlimited.

Now I was used to it, the bell-like silence was louder than ever, and I was starting to get undertones of orange blossom and incense. You have to be careful with this stuff or you begin to sound like a wine taster—with about the same amount of meaningless bollocks.

Now, personally, I’d have been happier driving an armored personnel carrier in through the front door. But since we’re the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn’t have one.

“Somebody’s lying,” I said, which got me a look of amused indulgence from Stephanopoulos and a snort from Seawoll. Of course somebody was lying—we were the police—somebody was always lying to us.

I wasn’t ready to believe in ghosts, but that’s the thing about empirical experience: it’s the real thing.

I could see the cartoon slot machine flicker behind his eyes. Nightingale was offering what the ridiculously rich always crave—a chance to be exclusive.

Desperate people do desperate things," said Spencer-Talbot. "Perhaps if we all did more to make things less desperate, then perhaps there would be less violence.

Charing Cross Road was once the bookselling heart of London and disreputable enough to avoid the multinational chains in their unceasing quest to turn every street of every city into a clone of every other.