Top 250 Ben Aaronovitch Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I think you’re going to find Marcus Aurelius particularly useful.’ ‘For what?’ I asked. Nightingale hesitated. ‘Quoting, mainly,’ he said. ‘And thus maintaining an air of erudition and authority.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

152. “Or as my dad always says: it only becomes a social problem when the working man joins in.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

153. “He asked if we were really ghost hunting, and I said we were. “What, like officially?” “Officially secret,” I said because discretion is supposed to be, if not our middle name, at least a nickname we occasionally answer to when we remember.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

154. “You can’t die of jazz,” said Dr. Walid. “Can you?” I thought of Fats Navarro, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker who, when he died, was mistaken by a coroner for a man twice his real age. “You know,” I said, “I think you’ll find you can.” Jazz.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

155. “If you find yourself talking to the police, my advice is to stay calm but look guilty; it’s your safest bet.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

156. “Inside, it was very dark but I am, if not exactly a master, then definitely an apprentice in the secret arts. And as such I laugh in the face of darkness.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

157. “Vanessa made a strange inarticulate sound common to Germans who’ve figured out how to start a sentence but don’t know how it ends.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

158. “That’s because they don’t know,’ said Tyburn. ‘It’s like economics. Everybody’s got a theory, and some people make it their religion.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

159. “You never said you used to play Dungeon and Dragons,” Lesley had said when I explained my reasoning. I’d been tempted to tell her that I was thirteen at the time, and anyway it was Call of Cthulhu, but I’ve learned from bitter experience that such remarks generally only make things worse.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

160. “One Hyde Park squatted next to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel like a stack of office furniture, and with all the elegance and charm of the inside of a photocopier. Albeit a brand new photocopier that doubled as a fax and document scanner.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

161. “I didn’t ask why anybody would want to risk the electric two-step on the tracks because, as police, all three of us knew that there wasn’t anything so stupid that somebody wouldn’t try it sooner or later.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

162. “The media are doing this, not because they have a sinister motive, but because they love to feel that they are influencing events. That’s why they hate politicians so much, because politicians have direct power and they do not.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

163. “Boss,’ I said into my Airwave. ‘It’s getting needlessly metaphysical out here.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

164. “If you’re afraid of wolves,’ said Varvara Sidorovna, ’don’t go to the woods.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

165. “This is your brain on magic.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

166. “The stairs down to the scene were so narrow that we had to wait for a herd of forensics types to come up before we could go down. There’s no such thing as a full-service forensics team. It’s very expensive, so you order bits of it up from the Home Office like a Chinese takeout. Judging by the number of noddy suits filing past us Stephanopoulis had gone for the super-deluxe meal for six with extra egg fried rice. I was, I guessed, the fortune cookie.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

167. “Americans, who intellectually knew the rest of the world existed but didn’t really believe it.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

168. “Like young men from the dawn of time, I decided to choose the risk of death over certain humiliation.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

169. “The narrow hallway was lined with framed photographs while the far end was dominated by a faux movie poster for Gone with the Wind starring Ronald Reagan sweeping Margaret Thatcher off her feet while a mushroom cloud bloomed behind them. She promised to follow him to the end of the world. He promised to organise it.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

170. “I was pleased to see that even back in the glory days of the Folly people left their mugs of tea on their magical textbooks.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

171. “I woke in the hour before dawn, stuck in that strange state where the memory of your dreams is still powerful enough to motivate your actions.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

172. “Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that’ Dizzy Gillespie.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

173. “What have we got to lose?” I said. Nightingale looked up and gave me a strange, sad smile. “Oh, everything, Peter,” he said. “But then, such is life.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

174. “I don’t know why Nightingale was so surprised – I barely knew four and a half spells and you couldn’t have got me to give it up, and that’s despite close brushes with death by vampire, hanging, malignant spirit, riot, tigerman, and the ever-present risk of overdoing the magic and getting a brain aneurysm.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

175. “You know there’s always things in life that you have to do despite the fact that you know for certain the outcome is going to be messy, painful, humiliating, or all three.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

176. “Stop, police!’ I shouted, on the basis that one of these days it was going to have the right effect.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

177. “If you ask any copper why they stick at a job which exposes them to abuse from everyone from petty criminals all the way down to government ministers, they’ll say it’s the variety.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

178. “I don’t like it, Peter,” he’d said after the morning briefing. “It’s all too complicated. Chorley has proved masterful at deceiving us in the past.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

179. “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.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

180. “Even in the 1980s your average young archaeologist would have had difficulty raising capital for a house. I knew this because it’s one of the things archaeologists will tell you about, at length, at the slightest provocation.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

181. “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.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

182. “Bollocks, I thought, or testiculi or possibly testiculos if we were using the accusative.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

183. “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.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

184. “She was staring at us over the top of a pair of completely pointless sunglasses and her phone was playing what I now recognised as The Day the World Turned Day-Glo by X-Ray Specs.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

185. “He should have been wearing a black roll-neck jumper with a faux military insignia on his chest, but obviously Skinner hadn’t been reading the script and had turned out for the final confrontation in jeans, black Nike trainers and a loose blue pinstripe collarless shirt. He was, at least, sitting in a swivel chair in front of the steady unblinking lights of the HPC rack. But he didn’t say, ‘Ahh, Mr Grant, we meet again,’ which showed a shocking lack of etiquette on his part.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

186. “Phillip told me proudly that his mum had ceased to be a practicing Catholic the day after he came out. “She says she will go back to the Church the day it apologizes,” he said.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

187. “I took the swab using the collection kit that I’d borrowed from Dominic who, I realized, had left the Boy Scout scale behind and was now verging on Batman levels of crazy preparedness.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

188. “I heard a woman scream with rage and frustration and then grunt like a tennis player.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

189. “It’s not the book that’s important,’ I said. ‘It’s the reading.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

190. “Magic is not about passion or anger or the power of friendship. Magic is about control, focus, and being able to concentrate when you’re drowning to death.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

191. “Given that all three of us were Londoners, we paused a moment to carry out the ritual of the “valuation of the property.” I guessed that, given the area, it was at least a million and change. “Million and a half, easy,” said Carey. “More,” said Guleed. “If it’s freehold.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

192. “Abigail gave me a withering look. But everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

193. “Taking a statement from anyone can be a long process on account of the fact that your average member of the public wouldn’t know the truth if it donned a pink tutu and danced in front of them singing the Chicken Song. This.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

194. “We’re walking down to the east side of the Model Boating Pond because I reckon there’ll be fewer people to notice that I’m carrying a talking fox around my neck.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

195. “Apparently after six days baking pigs and herding bricks, the inhabitants would kick back with a spot of cock-fighting, bullbaiting, and ratting. It was the sort of place an adventurous gentleman might venture only if he didn’t mind being beaten, rolled, and catching an exciting venereal disease.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

196. “My dad was a fairy,” said Zach. “And by that I don’t mean he dressed well and enjoyed musical theatre.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

197. “Welcome to the Folly,” he said. “Official home of English magic since 1775.” “And your patron saint is Sir Isaac Newton?” I asked. Nightingale grinned. “He was our founder and the first man to systemize the practice of magic.” “I was taught that he invented modern science,” I said. “He did both,” said Nightingale. “That’s the nature of genius.” Nightingale.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

198. “It’s an iron rule of mine that I never argue correlation versus causation in the middle of the night, especially when I had an alternative option.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

199. “Archway is where the post-war dream of the urban motorway died in the teeth of local opposition and the inability of the designers to answer basic traffic management questions.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

200. “I was tempted to tell her it was because we were British and actually had a sense of humour, but I try not to be cruel to foreigners, especially when they’re that strung out.”

— Ben Aaronovitch