Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale – to the Jag mobile.
BEN AARONOVITCHThe motto of West African cooking is that if the food doesn’t set fire to the tablecloth the cook is being stingy with the pepper.
More Ben Aaronovitch Quotes
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What’s the biggest thing you’ve zapped with a fireball?’ I asked. ‘That would be a tiger,’said Nightingale. ‘Well don’t tell Greenpeace,’ I said. ‘They’re an endagered species.’ ‘Not that sort of tiger,’ said Nightingale. ‘
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And once they start to think about the consequences, they almost always calm down. Unless they’re drunk, of course. Or stoned. Or aged between fourteen and twenty-one. Or Glaswegian.
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Actually I’d always thought he sat in the library with a slim volume of metaphysical poetry until the commissioner called him on the bat phone and summoned him into action. Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale – to the Jag mobile.
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What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata.
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Are they really gods?” “I never worry about theological questions,” said Nightingale. “They exist, they have power and they can breach the Queen’s peace – that makes them a police matter.
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The worst part is staying in the room after you’ve broken the news, so that you’re forced to be there when someone’s life disintegrates around them. Some people say it doesn’t bother them – such people are not to be trusted.
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Conflict resolution,’ said Nightingale. ‘Is this what they teach at Hendon these days?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘But don’t worry, they also teach us how to beat people with phone books and the ten best ways to plant evidence.
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Carved above the lintel were the words SCIENTIA POTESTAS EST. Science points east, I wondered? Science is portentous, yes? Science protests too much. Scientific potatoes rule. Had I stumbled on the lair of dangerous plant geneticists?
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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.
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The study of the victim is called victimology because everything sounds better with and ology tacked on the end.
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You know, your species [humans] has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity in trying to destroy itself.
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This is your brain on magic.
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The Metropolitan Police Service is still, despite what people think, a working-class organisation and as such rejects totally the notion of an officer class.
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Coffee arrived and the espresso was excellent, like an aromatic electric fence.
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I gave the prescribed Metropolitan Police “first greeting”. “Oi!” I said “What do you think you’re doing?
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