Ben Aaronovitch Quotes

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.

Cyrus was a musician?" I asked.
"He played the alto sax."
"And he played jazz?"
Another brief smile. "Is there any other kind of music?

You can't die of jazz," said Dr. Walid. "Can you?"
I thought of Fats Navarro, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker who, when he died, was mistaken by a coroner for a man twice his real age.
"You know," I said, "I think you'll find you can.

It’s a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.

Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that.
—Dizzy Gillespie

Have you ever been to London?" I asked.
"No," said Ash. "I've never even been in town before. Our dad doesn't hold with that sort of thing."
"Don't worry, it's basically just like the country," I said. "Only with more people.

Lives to act, poor thing, it's all he ever wanted out of life."
"Except he's dead," I said.
"I know," said Mr. Punch. "Isn't the universe wonderful.

Given that he was writing in the late eighteenth century, I like to cut him slack.

Nobody had a clue what had happened, so the pundits were out in force, explaining how the riot was caused by whatever sociopolitical factor their latest book was pushing. It was certainly a searing indictment of some aspect of modern society—if only we knew what.

Nobody likes a riot except looters and journalists.

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.

There we continued the time-honored tradition of brazenly lying through our teeth while telling nothing but the truth.

“Do you have another plan?” I asked.
“No,” said Leslie. “I just want you to be careful. Just because you think you know what you’re doing doesn’t mean you actually know what you’re doing.”
“I’m glad we clarified that,” I said.

Sometimes when someone tells you not to go somewhere, it’s better not to go there.

As a typical Londoner, Gurcan had a high tolerance threshold 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.