Quotes from Ben Aaronovitch

It was a good plan, and like all plans since the dawn of time, this would fail to survive contact with real life.

The night may be dark and full of terrors, I thought, but I've got a big stick.

So that's when I came up with the most ridiculous plan since I'd decided to take a witness statement from a ghost. It was a plan so stupid that even Baldrick would have rejected it out of hand.

From then on, it was even twistier B-roads through a country so photgenically rural that I half expected to meet Bilbo Baggins around the next corner - providing he'd taken to driving a Nissan Micra.

I'd been too intent on the room to hear her coming up the stairs. Leslie said that the capacity not to notice a traditional Dutch folk dancing band walk up behind you was not a survival characteristic in the complex, fast-paced world of the modern policing environment. I'd like to point out that I was trying to give directions to a slightly deaf tourist at the time, and anyway it was a Swedish dance troupe.

NIGHTINGALE AND I did what all good coppers do when faced with a spare moment in the middle of the day—we went looking for a pub.

Coffee arrived and the espresso was excellent, like an aromatic electric fence.

Here's a comforting thought for you, Peter,' he said. 'However long you may live, the world will never lose its ability to surprise you with its beauty.

sudden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policemen of a certain rank and age; it's like a normal midlife crisis only with more chandeliers and foreign languages.

Can you sacrifice people?' I asked. 'Take their magic that way?' 'Yes,' he said. 'But there's a catch.' 'What's the catch?' 'You get hunted down even unto the ends of the Earth and summarily executed.

There are people who have been touched by, let's call it for the sake of argument, magic to the point where they're no longer entirely people even under human rights legislation. Nightingale calls them the fae but that's a catch-all term like the way the Greeks used the word "barbarian" or the Daily Mail uses "Europe.

Americans, who intellectually knew the rest of the world existed but didn't really believe it.

It took the Fire Brigade a day and a half to secure the remains of the house enough to recover Crew Cut's body, which was described by Dr Jennifer Vaughan as 'suffering from crush trauma' and by Dr Walid as 'mostly flat'.

Rule of policing number one – when something good falls into your lap, pass it up the chain of command as quickly as possible before something else bad can happen.

I saw a dark void under the platform and had just enough time to think: "Fuck me he's a earthbender.

The Metropolitan Police has a very straightforward approach to murder investigations, not for them the detective's gut instinct or the intricate logical deductions of the sleuth savant. No, what the Met likes to do is throw a shitload of manpower at the problem and run down every single lead until it is exhausted, the murderer is caught or the senior investigating officer dies of old age.

You shouldn't make jokes about these things," she said. "Science doesn't have all the answers, you know." "It's got all the best questions, though,

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.

The Folly had last been refurbished in the 1930s when the British establishment firmly believed that central heating was the work, if not of the devil per se, then definitely evil foreigners bent on weakening the hardy British spirit.

the rules of English grammar are largely an artificial construct with little or no bearing on the language as it is spoke.

Fuck me,' I said to Toby. 'We're living in Isengard.

Boss,' I said into my Airwave. 'It's getting needlessly metaphysical out here.

I think becoming a wizard is about discovering what's real and what isn't.

Blackstone's Police Operational Handbook recommends the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, and Check everything.