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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Ben Aaronovitch

Ben Aaronovitch

First law of gossip – there’s no point knowing something if somebody else doesn’t know you know it.

Ben Aaronovitch

He was a Parisian,’ he said. ‘You can never be sure what Parisians believe in – beyond Paris of course.

france, humour, paris

Ben Aaronovitch

This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly. Sucks to be you, quadruped. Opposable thumbs – don’t leave home without them.

biped, evolution, human, opposable, primates, quadruped, thumb

Ben Aaronovitch

He called it potentia because there’s nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you’re making it up as you go along.

disguise, language, latin, obfuscated

Ben Aaronovitch

The problem with the so-called bloody surveillance state is that it’s hard work trying to track someone’s movements using CCTV – especially if they’re on foot. Part of the problem is that the cameras all belong to different people for different reasons. Westminster Council has a network for traffic violations, the Oxford Street Trading Association has a huge network aimed at shop-lifters and pickpockets, individual shops have their own systems, as do pubs, clubs and buses. When you walk around London it is important to remember that Big Brother may be watching you, or he could be having a piss, or reading the paper or helping redirect traffic around a car accident or maybe he’s just forgotten to turn the bloody thing on.

big-brother, cameras, fantasy, mystery, police-procedural, security-cameras, surveillance-society

Ben Aaronovitch

Fuck me, I thought. I can do magic.

magic, peter-grant, rivers-of-london

Ben Aaronovitch

I did feel a ‘something’, like a catch in the silence at the moment of creation.

Ben Aaronovitch

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.

consequences, human-sacrifice, magic

Ben Aaronovitch

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.

decision, humiliation

Ben Aaronovitch

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there’s someone else to do the housework.

Ben Aaronovitch

So magic is real,’ I said. ‘Which makes you a … what?’‘A wizard.’‘Like Harry Potter?’Nightingale sighed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not like Harry Potter.’‘In what way?’‘I’m not a fictional character,’ said Nightingale.

harry-potter, humur

Ben Aaronovitch

In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.

cold, good-book, winter