Quotes from Ben Aaronovitch

The weak socialisation makes opening the fridge an exciting adventure in microbiology, and the boots mean that every shift change sounds like an avalanche.

I'd tell you, but then you'd have to section me," I said.

Typically, a constable only sits in the Commissioner's anteroom when he's been very brave or very stupid, and I really couldn't tell which one applied to me.

we collected a representative sample of phones, cameras, and laptops from the SOCOs. Or, more precisely, we pried them out of their reluctant fingers by promising that everything that needed logging or signing would be logged and signed, and that the chain of custody would be maintained yea, even unto the end of days, or the first court appearance—whichever came first.

African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.

You can always tell an old cop car because however hard you scrub, it always smells of old cop.

We did an hour of practice, at the end of which I was capable of flinging a fireball down the range at the dizzying speed of a bumblebee who'd met his pollen quota and was taking a moment to enjoy the view.

So Newton, like all good seventeenth-century intellectuals, wrote in Latin because that was the international language of science, philosophy and, I found out later, upmarket pornography.

Seawoll's people would provide containment in case things went pear-shaped, while Dr Walid stood by with a mobile trauma team to help any poor bastard who had the bad luck to have their face fall off.

There was a list, Kimberley imagined, and in an obscure subsection of that list, a section that had not been properly updated since George Bush was President,

Mr Punch was running for his afterlife, but I was gaining.

faith among the rank and file that everyone above superintendent has had their sense of irony surgically removed. Often the word "proactive" is added at the front to create a kind of litany. O lead us intelligently into the valley of the shadow of limited resources so that we might make our crime targets before the end of the Home Office reporting period—Amen.

I gave them most of the options, but left out Bitcoin mining. Because not only would the explanation of why that uses huge amount of power have taken about three hours, but also because I was a bit hazy on the details myself.

The original Society of the Wise, which was your actual official name for the Folly, had been proudly part of the Enlightenment. God, if he existed, was the ultimate master craftsman who had set the world in motion, with fixed immutable laws, and then left it to get on with things. They saw angels and devils as abstract concepts and held that anything wandering around with a halo, wings, or a pitchfork was either an uppity fae, a con man, or a mountebank.

Nobody knows why some systems—rivers, forests, possibly the London Underground but we're not sure—acquire a genius loci. Not even the genii locorum themselves know the why and the how of it—they only know it happens.

The bridge] looked more like a fishing pier that had got ideas above its station and crossed the river in a fit of exuberance.

Why would a young man like you be interested in history?" "So I can avoid repeating it." "Then stay away from men who talk about the fatherland," he said. "That's my advice.

If you're afraid of wolves,' said Varvara Sidorovna, 'don't go to the woods.

Ash turned out to be a young man half a head taller than me, broad of shoulder, clear of eye, noble of brow and empty of thought.

the Ikea bed with an incomprehensible name,

Did he just ask us to lie to a senior officer?" I asked. "Yup," said Leslie. "Just checking," I said. So we spent the rest of the afternoon bearing false witness in separate interview rooms.

It was a poem of volume and geometry without humanity—a little bit of Swiss megalomania come to the North. As Bev says, I have views about the International Style.

Do you know what happened to the last police officer who made a joke about DS Stephanopoulos?" "No, what did happen to him?" "Nobody else knows either

When it was my turn and I stood up and called for life, liberty and peace and managed to sit down before I added a hard-boiled egg to the list.