Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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The Metropolitan Police Service is still, despite what people think, a working-class organisation and as such rejects totally the notion of an officer class. That is why every newly minted constable, regardless of their educational background, has to spend a two-year probationary period as an ordinary plod on the streets. This is because nothing builds character like being abused, spat at and vomited by members of the public.
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You know, your species [humans] has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity in trying to destroy itself.
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My dad once told me that the secret to a happy life was never to start something with a girl unless you were willing to follow wherever it led. It's the best piece of advice he has ever given me, and probably the reason I was born.
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The study of the victim is called victimology because everything sounds better with and ology tacked on the end.
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Every male in the world thinks he's an excellent driver. Every copper who's ever had to pick an eyeball out of a puddle knows that most of them are kidding themselves.
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It's a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.
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What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata, a physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees.
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Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It's not your garden, it's not a park - it's a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer's plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness.
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Questions would be asked. Answers would be ignored.
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When you're a boy your life can be measured out as a series of uncomfortable conversations reluctantly initiated by adults in an effort to tell you things that you either already know or really don't want to know.
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If you just warn people, they often simply ignore you. But if you ask them a question, then they have to think about it. And once they start to think about the consequences, they almost always calm down. Unless they're drunk, of course. Or stoned. Or aged between fourteen and twenty-one. Or Glaswegian.
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Are they really gods?" "I never worry about theological questions," said Nightingale. "They exist, they have power and they can breach the Queen's peace - that makes them a police matter.
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On the plus side, there were no rioters in sight but on the minus side this was probably because everywhere I looked was on fire.
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Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.
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The general public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you've generated some sort of lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life - like drinking and sleeping, and if you're lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice.
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The motto of West African cooking is that if the food doesn't set fire to the tablecloth the cook is being stingy with the pepper.
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The media are doing this, not because they have a sinister motive, but because they love to feel that they are influencing events. That's why they hate politicians so much, because politicians have direct power and they do not.
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The clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop
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If you find yourself talking to the police, my advice is to stay calm but look guilty; it's your safest bet.
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What do you think you're doing?
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In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.
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Somebody doesn't know they're not in Kansas anymore,' said Stephanopoulos.
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Conflict resolution,' said Nightingale. 'Is this what they teach at Hendon these days?' 'Yes, sir,' I said. 'But don't worry, they also teach us how to beat people with phone books and the ten best ways to plant evidence.
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...good-Samaritanism in London is considered an extreme sport - like base-jumping or crocodile-wrestling.
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Actually I'd always thought he sat in the library with a slim volume of metaphysical poetry until the commissioner called him on the bat phone and summoned him into action. Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.
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That which does not kill us has to get up extra early in the morning if it wants to get us next time.
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This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.
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My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner.
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Coffee arrived and the espresso was excellent, like an aromatic electric fence.
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He was calling it an atonic seizure because, even if he didn't know why it had happened, it was important to give it a cool name.
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