Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes

“For a terrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me, but fortunately we both remembered we were English just in time. Still, it was a close call.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“I gave the prescribed Metropolitan Police "first greeting".
"Oi!" I said "What do you think you're doing?”
― Ben Aaronovitch

“The clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“My Dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you're born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train's pulled into Piccadilly Circus they've become a Londoner.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“Could it have been anyone, or was it destiny? When I'm considering this I find it helpful to quote the wisdom of my father, who once told me, "Who knows why the fuck anything happens?”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot

“Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground

“Fuck me, I thought. I can do magic.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot

“The 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.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot

“This is why magic is worse even than quantum physics. Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I've never yet had a Higgs bosun turn up and try to have a conversation with me.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground

“Questions would be asked. Answers would be ignored.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot

“If you just warn people, they often simply ignore you. But if you ask them a question, then they have to think about it. 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.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“It’s a truism in policing that witnesses and statements are fine, but nothing beats empirical physical evidence. Actually it isn’t a truism because most policemen think the word ‘empirical’ is something to do with Darth Vader, but it damn well should be.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“If you find yourself talking to the police, my advice is to stay calm but look guilty; it's your safest bet.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot

“That which does not kill us,” I said, “has to get up extra early in the morning if it wants to get us next time.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes

“We were aiming for a cross between Kafka and Orwell, which just goes to show how dangerous it can be when your police officers are better read than you are.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“He was calling it an atonic seizure because, even if he didn't know why it had happened, it was important to give it a cool name.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“I have an idea," I said.

"This better not be a cunning plan," said Leslie.

Nightingale looked blank, but at least it got a chuckle from Dr Walid.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot

“On the plus side, there were no rioters in sight but on the minus side this was probably because everywhere I looked was on fire.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Midnight Riot

“It's a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“There's more to life than just London," said Nightingale.
"People keep saying that," I said. "But I've never actually seen any proof.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“Why would a young man like you be interested in history?"
"So I can avoid repeating it."
"Then stay away from men who talk about the fatherland," he said. "That's my advice.”
― Ben Aaronovitch

“He threw a fireball at me. I threw a chimney stack at him - that's the London way.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
― Neil Gaiman

“When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.”
― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions

“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
― Neil Gaiman

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane