Quotes from Ben Aaronovitch

Tolkien and my dad had weirdly convergent ideas about the musical nature of the universe, although my dad would probably have been more forgiving of Melkor's improvisation. You know, providing it didn't step on his solo.

But as the wise man said, life's too short to drink bad wine. Regret is a terrible vintage.

The flats were solidly built, so at least I didn't grow up listening to next door's live docusoap, but they were built on the dubious assumption, so beloved of postwar planners, that the London working class was composed entirely of hobbits.

The furniture looked like John Lewis – expensive, comfortable and unimaginative.

She got me logged in, which was a suspicous amount of help and attention from a Detective Inspector, and explained the priority codes to me. 'Officially, low means we want it within a week,' said Stephanopoulos. 'Medium is five days and high priority is three.' 'And really?' I asked. 'Today, now and 'I want it bloody yesterday.

The air was still and tasted flat, like water that had been boiled more than once.

Foxholes might breed belief, but trench systems are full of fatalistic cynics.

insouciance. But there's just something uniquely intimidating about

I don't like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers.

His mum was Filipino

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen,

Morris being an old word for dance, by the way—it's amazing what you pick up on the job.

Street towards Covent Garden. There was

THE MEDIA response to unusual weather is as ritualized and predictable as the stages of grief. First comes denial: "I can't believe there's so much snow." Then anger: "Why can't I drive my car, why are the trains not running?" Then blame: "Why haven't the local authorities sanded the roads, where are the snowplows, and how come the Canadians can deal with this and we can't?

Sometimes I wonder whether, if I'd been the one that went for coffee and not Lesley May, my life would have been much less interesting and certainly much less dangerous. Could it have been anyone, or was it destiny? When I'm considering this I find it helpful to quote the wisdom of my father, who once told me, 'Who knows why the fuck anything happens?

If you overdo it there are consequences,' said Nightingale. I didn't like the sound of that at all. 'What kind of consequences?' 'Strokes, brain haemorrhages, aneurysms …' 'How do you know when you've overdone it?' 'When you have a stroke, a brain haemorrhage or an aneurysm,

at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation it was important to make a distinction between Artificial General Intelligence and ordinary AI. AGI being the sort that was self-aware enough to pass the Turing test and ask difficult philosophical questions before going "Daisy-Daisy" and trying to wipe out humanity, while ordinary AI mainly tried to sell you books on Amazon.

the police box was born. Here a police officer in need of assistance could find a telephone link to Scotland Yard, a dry space to do "paperwork" and, in certain extreme cases, a life of adventure through space and time.

Good at his job, I guessed, but probably not at ease with things that fall outside his comfort zone. He was going to love us.

I wondered whether it was chance or the malign workings of the YouTube algorithm. Because you liked happy cat videos, you might also want to smite this man with furious vengeance.

Was it better to die in the illusion of sunshine and warmth or face death in a cold darkness of reality? Was it better to die in happy ignorance or terrified knowledge? The answer, if you're a Londoner, is that it's better not to die at all.

Exurge domine et judica causum tuam," said Nightingale. " 'Arise, O God, judge thy own cause.' " "Psalm 73," said Postmartin. "The motto of the Spanish Inquisition." "Well, fuck me," said Seawoll. "I wasn't expecting them.

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.

As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and built walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born.