Ben Aaronovitch Quotes

You see, the trouble with detectives is that they’re detectives and are literally trained not to believe anything they haven’t verified themselves.

Why would someone use magic to kill a jazz musician in the middle of his set? I mean, I have my problems with the New Thing and the rest of the atonal modernists but I wouldn’t kill someone for playing it–at least not if I wasn’t trapped in the same room.

You're probably wondering why I decided to grace you with my presence," he said.
Which was true, since DCIs spend most of their life in their offices or, worse, in other people's offices and conference rooms. "Playing," Seawoll once said, "pin the fucking buzzword on the sodding flow chart.

It’s always better to tell a half-truth than a half-lie.

This is what’s known as operational flexibility, and definitely not making it up as you go along.

Dedication: This book is dedicated to all the people who get up and do something about it, whatever "it" is and however small the thing is they do.

I’ll say this for the Queen. She was brave—or possibly stupid. It’s easy to mistake the two.

Are you a practitioner?" I ask. "A wizard?"
"Sorceress, my dear," she says. "Practitioner is how the gentlemen have styled themselves, as quacks now style themselves as physicians.

Hyde Park Corner is what happens when a bunch of urban planners take one look at the grinding circle of gridlock that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and think—that’s what we want for our town.

According to my therapist, attaching conditionals to your past is a classic distancing technique indicating an unwillingness to face your memories directly. Or, I pointed out, it could be a rhetorical device designed to add a humorous note to enliven a story. To which she said, “Or both.” You can’t win with therapists, you know. And even if you do, they just tell you it’s part of the process.

For police officers, “close relative” frequently rhymes with “prime suspect.”

I wasn't eavesdropping," I said. "I was gathering intelligence.

Questions would be asked. Answers would be ignored.

None of this was real.
But I’ve learned that just because something isn’t real doesn’t mean it’s not important.

Back in the summer I’d made the mistake of telling my mum what I did for a living. Not the police bit, which of course she already knew about, having been at my graduation from Hendon, but the stuff about me working for the branch of the Met that dealt with the supernatural. 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.