The October Man Quotes

“I ended up learning magic because you can’t trust the British to keep to an agreement over the long term.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man

“Vanessa made a strange inarticulate sound common to Germans who’ve figured out how to start a sentence but don’t know how it ends.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man

“There was a statue on the lawn outside the institute of a woman, hand on breast, looking mournfully upwards as if contemplating the death of a loved one and the amount of paperwork it was bound to cause.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man

“gave us the traditional look of weary outrage that you always get from someone who thinks they don’t have time for this shit—”
― Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man

“When it’s still—when it’s the cellar of a house, or a ring of mushrooms in a forest or a gun emplacement outside Offenburg—it’s called one of two things. If it remains static and unchanging then we call it a despair. If it seeks to extend its influence then it is a malignancy. Or as the Director puts it—a despair will suck you in, but a malignancy is coming to get you.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man

“Gaston was a short, bulky man in his late fifties who favoured tight jeans, studded belts and sleeveless T-shirts, the better to show off the tattoos on his own arms. Only the absence of a mullet or a purple Mohican saved him from a breach of the EU directive against egregious cliché embodiment.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man

“But as the wise man said, life’s too short to drink bad wine. Regret is a terrible vintage.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man

“Das Leben ist zu kurz, um schlechten Wein zu trinken.
- Quoted from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe”
― Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man

“Most people react this way when I tell them about the Nazis. Would it be more or less comforting if we could attribute that particular part of our history to the supernatural?”
― Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man

“Surely we need to at least identify who they are?” I’d asked the Director the same thing once. “To what end?” she’d asked me, and now I asked Vanessa the same. “In case they’re a problem,” she said, which was pretty much what I’d said. The Director had slammed her fist on her desk hard enough to break her coffee cup. “And then what?” she’d asked. “We keep files on them? Or why not make it simple and require them to carry papers or perhaps sew a symbol onto their coats. A scarlet pentagram perhaps. Would that satisfy you?”
― Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man