Ben Aaronovitch Quotes

“Come on then,” yelled Beverley, for whom de-escalation was something that happened to other people.

Technically, you don't have to have a corpse to convict for murder but detectives always feel better when they've found your actual victim—they're superstitious like that.

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.

Gaston did betray an abstracted quality that might have been the result of magic. But was more likely down to consuming, I suspected, a tremendous amount of recreational chemicals.

Been there, I thought, done that, read The Silmarillion.

I find you get two types of police, those that don’t want to know and those that do. Unfortunately, dealing with things you don’t want to know about is practically a definition of policing.

God, money is so wasted on the rich.

Was it better to die in the illusion of sunshine and warmth or face death in a cold darkness of reality? Was it better to die in happy ignorance or terrified knowledge? The answer, if you’re a Londoner, is that it’s better not to die at all.

Apparently he was a bit of a connoisseur, having been introduced to Verdi soon after having risen to the rank of commander. A sudden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policemen of a certain rank and age; it’s like a normal midlife crisis, only with more chandeliers and foreign languages.

He believed in a mystical connection between the farmer and the soil."
"And you don't?" I asked.
"I believe there's a connection," she said. "I just happen to believe it's biochemical.

Isn't the internet wonderful?" she said. "Better than dragons any day.

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.

There's more to life than just London," said Nightingale.
"People keep saying that," I said. "But I've never actually seen any proof.

I asked whether the High Fae came into the pub.
Lulu gave me a crooked smile.
“High Fae?” She asked.
“You know,” I said. “The gentry, elves, those posh gits with extradimensional castles, stone spears and unicorns.”
“You mean them what step between worlds?”
“Could be.”
“Who walk on paths unseen and wax and wane with the moon?”
“Them sort of people,” I said. “Yeah.”
“Not in here, squire,” she said. “I run a respectable pub.”

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.