Quotes from Ben Aaronovitch

She bought it, but it took a bit more coaxing to bring out the ring, which she kept on a silver chain around her neck. She even dropped it into my palm after I promised not to throw it down the nearest volcano.

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.

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.

There's more to life than just London,' said Nightingale. 'People keep saying that,' I said. 'But I've never actually seen any proof.

He was one of those people who constantly seems to be having a conversation with someone other than the person he's actually talking to—presumably someone much more politically committed. And interested.

It's not the book that's important,' I said. 'It's the reading

Then there were the angels composed of interlocking wheels covered in sparkling eyes, and the seraphim who had six wings and spent their days circling God's throne, bigging him up through song.

When it's still—when it's the cellar of a house, or a ring of mushrooms in a forest or a gun emplacement outside Offenburg—it's called one of two things. If it remains static and unchanging then we call it a despair. If it seeks to extend its influence then it is a malignancy. Or as the Director puts it—a despair will suck you in, but a malignancy is coming to get you.

Cicero wouldn't approve of my writing style, but at least I pronounce his name with a hard C.

my therapist constantly tried to convince me that the networking was a displacement activity to help me avoid dealing with my own emotional issues.

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

Yes," I said, because you can't show weakness to posh people or they'll mercilessly take advantage. I think it's something they learn at school in between conversational French and practical condescension.

She had a narrow face which could fall into an expression of belligerent suspicion of such power that her teachers said they could feel it even when they were hiding in the staff room. It was her stubbornness, coupled with this expression – and routine everyday low grade racism – that kept her constantly on the verge of a school suspension.

This was all news to us lower ranks who, while we'd theoretically known Seawoll had parents, had always assumed that he'd been assembled in a factory somewhere outside Wakefield.

Perhaps dragons were a Northern thing, like flat caps and an ingrained sense of grievance.

It's one of those weird truths you learn early on as police that quite a high percentage of the public have all the survival instinct of a moth in a candle factory.

but the first rule about a black woman's hair is you don't talk about a black woman's hair. And the second rule is you don't ever touch a black woman's hair without getting written permission first. And that includes after sex, marriage, or death for that matter. This courtesy is not reciprocated.

It was chintz but not the cat-lady chintz I was used to. Perhaps it was Mrs. Bellrush's manner or steely blue eyes but I got the distinct impression that this was aggressive chintz, warrior chintz, the kind of chintz that had gone out to conquer an Empire and still had the good taste to dress for dinner. Any IKEA flat-pack that showed its face around here was going to be kindling.

A negative result is almost as good as a positive one,' said Seawoll. 'Isn't that so, Peter?' I hate it when people listen to what I say in an inappropriate fashion.

but the first rule about a black woman's hair is you don't talk about a black woman's hair. And the second rule is you don't ever touch a black woman's hair without getting written permission first.

He said it was wife's idea to name their daughter after him but I didn't believe him. Could have been worse, I decided. It could have been Nigella.

Seawoll sat in the executive leather operator's chair behind the desk wearing a dangerously stretched noddy suit that made him look like the Michelin Man's slightly deflated older brother.

I don't like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.

Zach Palmer, who was half human and half—we weren't really sure what, including the possibility that the other half might be human as well.