Ben Aaronovitch Quotes

In home furnishing terms, past a certain point, more money doesn’t get you anything except an increase in insurance premiums.

Now, I have - as Beverley says - views about architecture. But there's modern stuff I like. The Gherkin, the Lloyd's Building, even the Shard - despite the nagging feeling I get that Nazgûl should be roosting at the top. But the truth is that in the case of One Hyde Park my boy Sir Roger was definitely just putting in the hours for the pay check. It's not ugly as such...it's just not anything in particular.

Dedication: This book is dedicated to all librarians everywhere—for they are the true keepers of the secret flame and not to be trifled with.

I've loaded this particular gun with scrap iron," she said. "Now, I don't know if a shot to the head will kill you or not. But just consider how much fun we can have finding out.

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

This was the Wyldewood, spelt with a Y, that once covered the Island of Britain and would again, once the pesky tool-using primates had done the decent thing and exterminated themselves.

“So the moon effects magic, why?”
“I’m working on several theories,” I said. “But I’m currently favoring the hypothesis that the moon has a seemingly arbitrary effect on magic because it likes to piss me off.”
“That’s a theory with a high degree of applicability to other spheres of life,” he said.

They've got me reviewing statements during the initial investigation," he said. "Occasionally I punch myself in the face to keep awake.

The Daily Mail had the scoop but the media had caught the smell of blood in the water and twenty-four-hour news outlets were running the bulletin every half an hour, with a teaser on the quarter in case your attention span was that short.

“Of course now I realize it was a telepathic compulsion.”
I was afraid to ask from who—but I had to know.
“From aliens,” she told me.
“Aliens?”
“I’m not mad, you know,” she said. “I’ve been sectioned. They put me in for four weeks’ ‘evaluation’ and at the end the top shrink calls me into her office and looks me in the eye and says, ‘you’re saner than I am—go away.’”
“Did you tell them about the aliens?” I asked.
“I may have glossed over some of the details,” she said.

Any abductions?" I asked.
"Loads," he said. "But none verified.

One of the advantages of being the police is that when you want to buy something slightly dodgy, you generally know where to shop.

Taking a statement from anyone can be a long process on account of the fact that your average member of the public wouldn’t know the truth if it donned a pink tutu and danced in front of them singing the Chicken Song.

“How about this then, Peter,” she said. “You’ve been part of something that no wizard has ever been part of before. You know something that’s not in their books.”
I wanted to say that lots of things weren’t in the libraries of the wise, including plate tectonics, molecular biology and the complete works of J. K. Rowling. But she’d probably say that I was missing the point.

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