Ben Aaronovitch Quotes

Policing is about moving from the unknown to the known and then further—to the provable.

After that I was up and ready for action. It might have been a Saturday, but below the rank of chief inspector weekends are an entirely notional concept.

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

Still magic, like policing, has always been much more about the practice than the theory.

I’m sorry, I couldn’t find “a good song” in your music. —Siri

“When you say shades, what do you mean?” I asked. “Do you mean Fae?”
“I mean everything that’s not normal,” said Mrs. Chin.
“Like New Jersey,” said Stephen.

The first rule of Big Brother is that Big Brother is never watching when you want him to.

The prisons are full of people with poor impulse control and a lack of foresight.

Miss Karmargi who’d been my Religious Education teacher at school. An avowed atheist who’d once said that she respected all religions equally—“which is more than can be said for most religions,” she’d added.

Nothing beats a long wait at a bus stop as a reality check.

God, I thought, Mum’s going to be upset if the rapture arrives and Jesus looks like Robin Williams.

What was a billionaire supposed to do? There was a limit to the effectiveness of charity, and paying more taxes just meant the government wasted your money on bureaucracy and cushy jobs for civil servants.

There's no glamour in infrastructure," he said as he filled our glasses again. "Steve and wee little William, right? They make stuff everyone uses every day but nobody thinks about the plumbing until it goes wrong.

I'm a magician, I am," he said. "I can see things that are really there.

He’d obviously wanted to tell someone about it for a long time and I was a convenient ear.
I get that a lot. Stephanopoulos calls it my secret weapon.
“It’s that vacant expression,” she said. “People just want to fill the empty void.”