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

202. “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

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

204. “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

205. “Then you throw the bloody thing as far as you can, hopefully outside the area of immediate magical effect, where two minutes later it basically phones the Met control room and screams help, help, serious magic shenanigans here – send help – preferably Nightingale.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

206. “All I can say is that he was found dead this morning and we’re treating it as suspicious.” It was the standard formula for these things, although a dead body at Baker Street Station was going to come in a close second to “commuter anger as snow shuts down London” on the lunchtime news. Assuming the media didn’t find a way to link both stories.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

207. “According to this thing I saw on the internet, cats and dogs use expressions on us that they don’t use on each other. This being on account of the fact that we effectively co-evolved together. So unless sheep are susceptible to a look of long-suffering patience, I’m going to say that the one Ziggy gave me was reserved for humans.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

210. “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

211. “Then he smiled at me and for that moment, and just that moment, I forgave him everything – everything – because now I knew what joy looked like and I was part of it.”

— 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. “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

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

234. “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

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

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

— Ben Aaronovitch

242. “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

243. “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

244. “A negative result is almost as good as a positive one,’ said Seawoll. ‘Isn’t that so, Peter?’ I hate it when people listen to what I say in an inappropriate fashion.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

245. “She bought it, but it took a bit more coaxing to bring out the ring, which she kept on a silver chain around her neck. She even dropped it into my palm after I promised not to throw it down the nearest volcano.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

246. “Here is a bit of man’s wisdom for you – when you think things can’t get worse, they usually do.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

247. “This was not a room that had been decorated. Rather it had accumulated over time around someone with a yen for comfort and a wicked sense of color.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

248. “I walked away with the cheerful step of a police officer who’s just made a tricky ethical question somebody else’s problem.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

249. “My father believes that everything is music,” I said. “And when you pass on you become part of the tune.” One improvisation amongst the millions and millions of melodies that create the symphony of everything. My dad basically believes that your life is your one chance at a solo – so it better be a good one. Mind you, he also thinks that Miles Davis was the Second Coming and most of the world’s woes are due to humanity’s failure to recognise him as such.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

250. “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