Aaronovitch Series Quotes & Sayings

When you're a boy your life can be measured out as a series of uncomfortable conversations reluctantly initiated by adults in an effort to tell you things that you either already know or really don't want to know. — Ben Aaronovitch

A good film demands its own score, and if you are a musician, your conscience will never allow you to do something mediocre for a good film. — A.R. Rahman

Music is a language, you see, a universal language. — Sun Ra

Labels only confuse people. The smarter people recognize artists who transcend categories. But I always try to entertain. It's in my nature; writers are born to entertain. If that means working ostensibly within a genre, fine. — John Shirley

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

Abigail stared suspiciously at Lesley. "Why are you wearing a mask?" she asked.
"Because my face fell off," said Lesley.
Abigail considered this for a moment and then nodded. "Okay," she said. — Ben Aaronovitch

Despite what you think you know, most people don't want to fight, especially when evenly matched. ... That's why you see those pissed young men doing the dance of "don't hold me back" while desperately hoping someone likes them enough to hold them back. — Ben Aaronovitch

Better known as the Secret of the Golden Flower, this is a famous neidan text that the Western world came to know through Richard Wilhelm's 1929 translation. The Chinese text used by Wilhelm was edited by Zhanran Huizhen zi in 1921. Besides this, at least five more versions are available, all of which date to the late Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and are ascribed to Lu Dongbin, who revealed them through spirit writing. — Monica Esposito

In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart. — Ben Aaronovitch

The 24% unemployment reached at the depths of the Great Depression was no picnic. — Barry Eichengreen