325 Quotes by 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.

Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale – to the Jag mobile.

The Folly had last been refurbished in the 1930s when the British establishment firmly believed that central heating was the work, if not of the devil per se, then definitely evil foreigners bent on weakening the hardy British spirit.

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

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.

Round and round and round we go and where we stop nobody knows.

I suspected Molly wanted the pictures to send to her friends on Twitter and Facebook, the ones that I was not supposed to know about. I didn’t dare ask because we have an unspoken agreement – I don’t question what she does on my computer when I’m out and, in return, she doesn’t murder me in my sleep. Back.

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.

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.