Ben Aaronovitch

It was a good plan, and like all plans since the dawn of time, this would fail to survive contact with real life.

“The scope of your ignorance, Peter,” said Seawoll, “is truly frightening.”

“Shouldn’t I know about these things?” I said.

“The list of things you need to know about, Peter, is extraordinarily long,” said Nightingale.

“If they were ugly, Peter, would you care half so much?” asked Nightingale. “There are some hideous things out there that can talk and reason, and I wonder if you would be quite so quick to rush to their defense.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But that just makes me shallow, it doesn’t make me wrong.”

The difference between stripping and burlesque, as far as I could tell, was class.

“Is that your professional opinion?”

“Yes.”

“Which as usual,” said Seawoll, “is as about as useful as a chocolate teapot.”

Half-caste, I thought. I hadn’t heard that one in a while. Not since Mum fell out with Aunty Doris, who having grown up in Jamaica in the 1950s regarded political correctness as something that happened to other people.

My hand was shaking a little and the pin proved harder to pull than I expected—I guess that’s a safety feature on a grenade.

Sometimes when someone tells you not to go somewhere, it’s better not to go there.

Why would someone use magic to kill a jazz musician in the middle of his set? I mean, I have my problems with the New Thing and the rest of the atonal modernists but I wouldn’t kill someone for playing it–at least not if I wasn’t trapped in the same room.

Given that he was writing in the late eighteenth century, I like to cut him slack.

Questions would be asked. Answers would be ignored.