Quotes by Ben Aaronovitch

The British have always been madly overambitious, and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight.

I didnt think that Herefordshire Social Services would be best pleased about me dumping a poorly socialised pre-teen with mind control powers on them.

Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.

Its a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something, but some members of the public are more guilty than others.

The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated -- thats the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you dont get a lot of practical experience.

Most people dont see half of whats in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral Savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climable trees. Thats why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isnt interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly colored stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, its those silent fur-covered merchants of death youve got to watch out for.

My mum translated this in her head to witchfinder, which was good because like most West Africans, she considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman.

The world was different before the war, he said. We didnt have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place - we still dreamed of secret caves in the Mountains of the Moon, and tiger hunting in the Punjab.

The clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop

In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.

So magic is real,’ I said. ‘Which makes you a … what?’‘A wizard.’‘Like Harry Potter?’Nightingale sighed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not like Harry Potter.’‘In what way?’‘I’m not a fictional character,’ said Nightingale.

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that theres someone else to do the housework.

You know theres always things in life that you have to do despite the fact that you know for certain the outcome is going to be messy, painful, humiliating, or all three.

Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest, Im not a country person. I dont like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.

He was a Parisian,’ he said. ‘You can never be sure what Parisians believe in – beyond Paris of course.

First law of gossip - theres no point knowing something if somebody else doesnt know you know it.

“Could it have been anyone, or was it destiny? When Im considering this I find it helpful to quote the wisdom of my father, who once told me, Who knows why the fuck anything happens?”