Ben Aaronovitch
168 quotes
Biography
Ben Dylan Aaronovitch is an English author and screenwriter. He is the author of the series of novels Rivers of London.
"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?"
"I wasn’t ready to believe in ghosts, but that’s the thing about empirical experience: it’s the real thing."
"She had the startled rabbit look that civilians get after five minutes of helping the police with their inquiries. If they stay calm for too long it’s a sign that they’re professional villains or foreign or just plain stupid. All of which can get you locked up if you’re not careful. If you find yourself talking to the police, my advice is to stay calm but look guilty; it’s your safest bet."
"Questions would be asked. Answers would be ignored."
"It’s a bland box of a building built in the 1970s; it was considered to be so lacking in architectural merit that there was talk of listing it so that it could be preserved for posterity as an awful warning."
"My hand was shaking a little and the pin proved harder to pull than I expected—I guess that’s a safety feature on a grenade."
"I’m not a peacock, but on occasion I like to dress to impress, although like most coppers I don’t wear much in the way of bling. The rule being never wear something around your neck that you don’t want to be strangled with."
"As a typical Londoner, Gurcan had a high tolerance threshold for random thoughtlessness; after all, if you live in the big city there’s no point complaining that it’s a big city, but even that tolerance has its limit."
"Sometimes when someone tells you not to go somewhere, it’s better not to go there."
"There we continued the time-honored tradition of brazenly lying through our teeth while telling nothing but the truth."
"Apparently he was a bit of a connoisseur, having been introduced to Verdi soon after having risen to the rank of commander. A 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."
"Nobody likes a riot except looters and journalists."
"Nobody had a clue what had happened, so the pundits were out in force, explaining how the riot was caused by whatever sociopolitical factor their latest book was pushing. It was certainly a searing indictment of some aspect of modern society—if only we knew what."
"Given that he was writing in the late eighteenth century, I like to cut him slack."
"It’s a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind."
"Why would someone use magic to kill a jazz musician in the middle of his set? I mean, I have my problems with the New Thing and the rest of the atonal modernists but I wouldn’t kill someone for playing it–at least not if I wasn’t trapped in the same room."
"When you’re a musician free is a magic number."
"The police can live with looking corrupt, bullying, or tyrannical, but looking stupid is intolerable. It has a tendency to undermine public faith in the forces of Law and is deleterious to public order."
"I rang her and left a message identifying myself and giving an impression of urgency without actually saying anything concrete. Never record anything you wouldn’t want turning up on YouTube is my motto."
"Five hundred years ago the notoriously savvy Henry VIII discovered an elegant way to solve both his theological problems and his personal liquidity crisis—he dissolved the monasteries and nicked all their land. Since the principle of any rich person who wants to stay rich is, never give anything away unless you absolutely have to, the land has stayed with Crown ever since."
"“The world was different before the war,” he said. “We didn’t 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.”"
"Ghosts, I was thinking, memories—I wasn’t sure there was a difference."
"The difference between stripping and burlesque, as far as I could tell, was class."
"I’m an old-fashioned copper–I don’t believe in breaking the laws of thermodynamics."
"Blackstone’s Police Operational Handbook recommends the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, and Check everything."