Top 250 Ben Aaronovitch Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “It’s one of those weird truths you learn early on as police that quite a high percentage of the public have all the survival instinct of a moth in a candle factory.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

206. “We traced a payment from one Antem Sergeyevich Yershov, a mid-tier oligarch,’ said Silver. Mid-tier meaning that he was merely obscenely wealthy, rather than functionally an independent nation state in his own right.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

207. “God bless busybody community matriarchs, and all that sail in them.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

208. “I asked whether the High Fae came into the pub. Lulu gave me a crooked smile. “High Fae?” she asked. “You know. The gentry, elves, those posh gits with extradimensional castles, stone spears and unicorns.” “You mean them what step between worlds?” “Could be.” “Who walk on paths unseen and wax and wane with the moon?” “Them sort of people,” I said. “Yeah.” “Not in here, squire,” she said. “I run a respectable pub.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

209. “There’s nothing like having your girlfriend talk in geological time to make you feel insignificant.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

210. “Vikings,” said Lesley. “Precisely,” said Nightingale. “Bloodthirsty, but surprisingly erudite in a limited fashion.” Well.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

211. “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.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

212. “By this point I was eager to emulate Guleed and merge unobtrusively with the imitation French farmhouse fittet cupboard and counter unit behind me.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

213. “So, actions were still being actioned and me and Guleed were actioning them, and the wheels of justice ground on. Albeit in first gear. So.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

214. “Even in these days of eBay and superencrypted anonymous purchasing over the Internet, the safest way to buy stolen stuff is to meet a total stranger and hand over a wedge of untraceable cash. They don’t know you, you don’t know them – the only problem is where to meet.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

215. “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.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

216. “Perhaps, I thought, the dead god gets folded into the existence of the new god, the way a dormant genetic variation can exist within an organism’s DNA – hanging about like an actor’s understudy until the right environmental conditions give it expression and – hey presto – suddenly a bacteria is heat resistant, our Chloe gets her big break on Broadway and a sniper for hire gets an unexpected half a meter of cold steel through the chest. Perhaps.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

217. “Now, for solid historical reasons, I’m not comfortable with dividing people up into groups.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

218. “I found that when people are nursing a grievance it’s a waste of time trying to explain the ubiquitous nature of coincidence in the universe. People always want things to happen for a reason.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

219. “One of his more famous sound bites was, ‘If you want something done, hire someone competent and then give them what they ask for.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

220. “Most people react this way when I tell them about the Nazis. Would it be more or less comforting if we could attribute that particular part of our history to the supernatural?”

— Ben Aaronovitch

221. “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.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

222. “You do magic by learning formae which are like shapes in your mind that have an effect on the physical universe.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

223. “NOBODY LIKES a riot except looters and journalists. The Metropolitan Police, being the go-ahead and dynamic modern police service that it is, has any number of contingency plans for dealing with civil disturbance. From farmers with truckloads of manure to suburban anarchists on a weekend break and Saturday jihadists. What I suspect they didn’t have plans for was just over two thousand enraged opera lovers pouring out of the Royal Opera House and going on a mad rampage through Covent Garden.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

224. “It’s not like me and Lesley are inconspicuous,’ I’d said. Nightingale had winced, as he always does, at my incorrect use of the accusative pronoun but I think I’m beginning to wear him down.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

225. “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.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

226. “Lesley said that my exes knew that past a certain point I’d lost interest, and that’s why they always packed me in first. That’s not the way I remember it, but Lesley swore she could have constructed a calendar based on my love life. A cyclical one, she said, like the Maya – counting down to disaster. Lesley could be surprisingly erudite sometimes.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

227. “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.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

229. “Or at least of fending him off for long enough that we can sweep in heroically like the Seventh Cavalry.’ Burning tipis and shooting women and children, I thought. And.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

230. “To them, fae basically meant anyone who was vaguely magical who hadn’t gone to the right school, with the High Fae being the creatures referenced in medieval literature who dwelled in their own castles with a proper feudal set-up and an inexplicable need to marry virtuous Christian knights.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

231. “The magical tradition I belong to exists in the gap between the observable universe and the rational clockwork creation of the Enlightenment. There’s this power. We don’t know where it comes from or why it follows the rules it does, but it definitely exists and there are definite ways to manipulate it. Further advances in science have done little to help our understanding, except to add a growing temptation to attach the word “quantum” to everything.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

232. “In home furnishing terms, past a certain point, more money doesn’t get you anything except an increase in insurance premiums. An.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

233. “Then there were the angels composed of interlocking wheels covered in sparkling eyes, and the seraphim who had six wings and spent their days circling God’s throne, bigging him up through song.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

234. “Through the mist the sun was a wavering disc kissing the shadowy arches of Waterloo Bridge.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

235. “You can say what you like about late-sixties architecture, but when they baked in the ugly they baked it in good.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

236. “That’s the nature of the beast,” said Zach. “We are what we are.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

237. “That’s the zeitgeist, isn’t it?” I said. “Back in medieval times she would have described it as an angel or a devil or a fairy. Nowadays everything is aliens.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

238. “My decision to apply to be a special agent crept up on me some time between the case of the spontaneously exploding tractor and the cows that ate Paris, Arkansas.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

239. “In the first place I don’t ‘make’ anybody do anything,” she said. “I merely offer people the opportunity to participate in the glorious pageant that is my existence on Earth. In which they come away greatly enriched, both emotionally and spiritually.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

240. “I saw nothing suspicious – which is unusual. A copper can usually find something suspicious if they look hard enough.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

241. “She came skipping down the central path, bringing with her the warmth of the sun. The yellow silk glowed, driving back the mist and with her came the smell of salt and the crash of gunpowder and the crack of canvas under strain.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

242. “This was all news to us lower ranks who, while we’d theoretically known Seawoll had parents, had always assumed that he’d been assembled in a factory somewhere outside Wakefield.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

243. “It never seemed to occur to Heather that Francisca might be a refugee from the dim and distant past – not even when she fainted at her first sight of an airliner. I’d have sussed it on the first day – which just goes to show why more science fiction should be included in the National Curriculum.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

244. “What makes you think I know?′ asked Zach, who, if questioned, would deny his own existence out of sheer habit.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

245. “Paul makes a noise – it’s all he’s got left, but I’ve taught myself to understand him and he wants me to keep reading. I tune out EastEnders and concentrate on Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett. It’s his favourite and I could do most of it off by heart, except it makes me cry at the end because now I know what magic can really do and what it can’t.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

246. “Now I was used to it, the bell-like silence was louder than ever, and I was starting to get undertones of orange blossom and incense. You have to be careful with this stuff or you begin to sound like a wine taster – with about the same amount of meaningless bollocks.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

247. “Perhaps dragons were a Northern thing, like flat caps and an ingrained sense of grievance.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

248. “Absence of evidence, as any good archeologist will tell you, is not the same as evidence of absence.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

249. “All the things laughed then, because there stood man – naked and bereft of all his gifts. All the things save the fox, who looked up at the man and saw long slim fingers unencumbered by claws, fingers that could grasp and take and reshape things to suit man’s own purposes. And saw eyes alive with a dreadful intelligence unencumbered by wisdom. And fox was suddenly afraid.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

250. “Every so often we could hear a low keening sound from the foxes, who had been banished to the patio and were staring into the house like the poor starving waifs they definitely weren’t.”

— Ben Aaronovitch