13 quotes
There we continued the time-honored tradition of brazenly lying through our teeth while telling nothing but the truth.
Rivers of London (2011)
Nobody likes a riot except looters and journalists.
Rivers of London (2011)
I wasn’t ready to believe in ghosts, but that’s the thing about empirical experience: it’s the real thing.
Rivers of London (2011)
Sometimes when someone tells you not to go somewhere, it’s better not to go there.
Rivers of London (2011)
Questions would be asked. Answers would be ignored.
Rivers of London (2011)
Given that he was writing in the late eighteenth century, I like to cut him slack.
Rivers of London (2011)
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.
Rivers of London (2011)
It’s a bland box of a building built in the 1970s; it was considered to be so lacking in architectural merit that there was talk of listing it so that it could be preserved for posterity as an awful warning.
Rivers of London (2011)
Could it have been anyone, or was it destiny? When I’m considering this I find it helpful to quote the wisdom of my father, who once told me, “Who knows why the fuck anything happens?”
Rivers of London (2011)
I’m not a peacock, but on occasion I like to dress to impress, although like most coppers I don’t wear much in the way of bling. The rule being never wear something around your neck that you don’t want to be strangled with.
Rivers of London (2011)
As a typical Londoner, Gurcan had a high tolerance threshold for random thoughtlessness; after all, if you live in the big city there’s no point complaining that it’s a big city, but even that tolerance has its limit.
Rivers of London (2011)
Nobody had a clue what had happened, so the pundits were out in force, explaining how the riot was caused by whatever sociopolitical factor their latest book was pushing. It was certainly a searing indictment of some aspect of modern society—if only we knew what.
Rivers of London (2011)
Apparently he was a bit of a connoisseur, having been introduced to Verdi soon after having risen to the rank of commander. A 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.
Rivers of London (2011)