The collection / 36 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated -- that's the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don't get a lot of practical experience.

Ben Aaronovitch / quote

02Undated

Most people don't see half of what's in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral Savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climable trees. That's why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isn't interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly colored stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, it's those silent fur-covered merchants of death you've got to watch out for.

Ben Aaronovitch / quote

03Undated

My mum translated this in her head to "witchfinder," which was good because like most West Africans, she considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman.

Ben Aaronovitch / quote

04Undated

The world was different before the war,' he said. 'We didn't have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place - we still dreamed of secret caves in the Mountains of the Moon, and tiger hunting in the Punjab.

Ben Aaronovitch / quote

05Undated

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 / quote

06Undated

In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.

Ben Aaronovitch / quote

07Undated

So magic is real,’ I said. ‘Which makes you a … what?’‘A wizard.’‘Like Harry Potter?’Nightingale sighed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not like Harry Potter.’‘In what way?’‘I’m not a fictional character,’ said Nightingale.

Ben Aaronovitch / quote

08Undated

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 / quote

09Undated

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.

Ben Aaronovitch / quote

10Undated

Despite my mum being from a small village in the middle of a forest, I'm not a country person. I don't like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers. But sometimes being police means holding your breath and fondling a pig.

Ben Aaronovitch / quote

11Undated

He was a Parisian,’ he said. ‘You can never be sure what Parisians believe in – beyond Paris of course.

Ben Aaronovitch / quote

12Undated

First law of gossip - there's no point knowing something if somebody else doesn't know you know it.

Ben Aaronovitch / quote