Home > Work > Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1) QUOTES

Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1) QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

2 " Fuck me, I thought. I can do magic. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

3 " I did feel a 'something', like a catch in the silence at the moment of creation. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

4 " 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 , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

5 " As I stepped onto the gloomy landing a word formed in my mind: two syllables, starts with a V and rhymes with dire. I froze in place. Nightingale said that everything was true, after a fashion, and that had to include vampires, didn’t it? I doubted they were anything like they were in books and on TV, and one thing was for certain — they absolutely weren’t going to sparkle in the sunlight. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

6 " 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 , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

7 " If you find yourself talking to the police, my advice is to stay calm but look guilty; it's your safest bet. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

8 " 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. That is why every newly minted constable, regardless of their educational background, has to spend a two-year probationary period as an ordinary plod on the streets. This is because nothing builds character like being abused, spat at and vomited by members of the public. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

9 " If you ask any police officer what the worst part of the job is, they will always say breaking bad news to relatives, but this is not the truth. 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. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

10 " He was from Yorkshire, or somewhere like that, and like many Northerners with issues, he'd moved to London as a cheap alternative to psychotherapy. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

11 " Keep breathing,’ I said. ‘It’s a habit you don’t want to break. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

12 " I left in a hurry before he could change his mind, but I want to make it clear that at no point did I break into a skip "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

13 " As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and build walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born. A bureaucracy breaks the complexity down into a series of interlocking systems. You don't need to know how the systems fit together, or even what function your bit of the system has, you just perform your bit and the whole machine creaks on. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

14 " ...good-Samaritanism in London is considered an extreme sport - like base-jumping or crocodile-wrestling. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

15 " Officially she was there to liaise with me on the case, but really she was there for the wide-screen TV, takeaways and the unresolved sexual tension. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

16 " ..sudden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policemen of a certain rank and age; it’s like a normal midlife crisis only with more chandeliers and foreign languages. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

17 " When I was a kid I used to drink from the tap all the time. I'd run back into the flat all hot and sweaty from playing and didn't even bother putting it in a glass, just turned the tap on and stuck my mouth underneath it. If my mom caught me doing it she used to scold me, but my dad just said that I had to be careful. 'What if a fish jumped out?' he used to say. 'You'd swallow it before you knew it was there.' Dad was always saying stuff like that and it wasn't until I was seventeen that I realised it was because he was stoned all the time. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

18 " NIGHTINGALE AND I did what all good coppers do when faced with a spare moment in the middle of the day—we went looking for a pub. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

19 " I think becoming a wizard is about discovering what's real and what isn't. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)

20 " We can't have your people fighting each other," I said. The 'royal we' is very important in police work; it reminds the person you're talking to that behind you stands the mighty institution that is the Metropolitan Police, robed in the full majesty of the law and capable, in manpower terms, of invading a small country. You only hope when you're using that term that the whole edifice is currently facing in the same direction as you are. "

― Ben Aaronovitch , Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)