Quotes from The Hanging Tree

“Boss,’ I said into my Airwave. ‘It’s getting needlessly metaphysical out here.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“Now, personally, I'd have been happier driving an armored personnel carrier in through the front door. But since we're the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn't have one.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“When the Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812, the British, in time-honoured fashion, abandoned their allies. Who were subsequently wiped out by the Americans along with any other tribes that happened to be in the same general vicinity – even those that had actually been allied with the US government during the war. It’s exactly this sort of thing, of course, which gives colonialism a bad name.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“Bollocks, I thought, or testiculi or possibly testiculos if we were using the accusative.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“Once the telephone had been invented, it was only a matter of time before the police got in on the new technology and, first in Glasgow and then in London, the police box was born. Here a police officer in need of assistance could find a telephone link to Scotland Yard, a dry space to do “paperwork” and, in certain extreme cases, a life of adventure through space and time.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“The designer had probably been going for Turkish Bath but had hit Czech Porn Shoot instead.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“The word “bollocks” is one of the most beautiful and flexible in the English language. It can be used to express emotional states ranging from ecstatic surprise to weary resignation in the face of inevitable disaster.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“When the treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812, the British, in time honored fashion, abandoned their allies. Who were subsequently wiped out by the Americans along with any other tribes that happened to be in the same general vicinity—even those that had actually been allied with the US government during the war. It’s exactly this sort of thing, of course, which gives colonialism a bad name. Nightingale”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“The main purpose of an administrative meeting is to establish collective guilt for whatever fuck-up arises out of its decisions. That”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“The word ‘bollocks’ is one of the most beautiful and flexible in the English language. It can be used to express emotional states ranging from ecstatic surprise to weary resignation in the face of inevitable disaster. And”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“I happened to know for a fact that the whole of Belgravia nick were running a pool on how long I would last and how I would go—the options being death, medical discharge (physical), medical discharge (psychological), indefinite disciplinary suspension, sacked for misconduct, secondment to Interpol and, with just one vote, ascension to a higher plane of existence. I suspected the last one was a bit unlikely. Guleed”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“I was pleased to see that even back in the glory days of the Folly people left their mugs of tea on their magical textbooks.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“Then he smiled at me and for that moment, and just that moment, I forgave him everything—everything—because now I knew what joy looked like and I was part of it. It”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“With a grunt he levered himself to his feet, causing the chair to bang against the bookcase behind him and set the various objet d’bollocks rattling.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“Jeremy Beaumont-Jones had been lucky enough to be born rich. He wasn’t in the mad oligarch class but once you’re past a certain point, the sheer weight of your money sucks in wealth like a financial singularity. If you’re sensible enough not to blow it on race horses, cocaine or musical theatre, then it becomes a perpetual-motion money making machine.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“five story Georgian terrace whose elegant proportions would have caused the most hardened Canadian property developer’s soul to weep to see such beauty—just prior to having the place gutted and filled with the latest in personality-free interior design.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“There was a list, Kimberley imagined, and in an obscure subsection of that list, a section that had not been properly updated since George Bush was President,”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“Boss,” I said into my Airwave. “It’s getting needlessly metaphysical out here.” “Ignore”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“The very rich, having fundamentally missed the point of urban living, have long been frustrated by the fact that it’s impossible to squeeze the amenities of a country mansion—car showroom, swimming pool, cinema, servants quarters etc.—into the floor space of your average London terrace. Those without access to trans-dimensional engineering, a key Time Lord discovery, have had to resort to extending their houses into the ground. Thus proving that all that stands between your average rich person and a career in Bond villainy is access to an extinct volcano. They”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“Or at least of fending him off for long enough that we can sweep in heroically like the Seventh Cavalry.’ Burning tipis and shooting women and children, I thought. And”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“Sir Isaac Newton legendarily wrote the famous Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which gave us principles that a couple of hundred years later were good enough to land a man on the moon. Then he wrote the slightly less well known Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis, which codified the magical techniques that allow me to inconvenience paper targets and Nightingale to demolish small agricultural buildings. “There”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“Hyde Park Corner is what happens when a bunch of urban planners take one look at the grinding circle of gridlock that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and think—that’s what we want for our town.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“Now, personally, I’d have been happier driving an armored personnel carrier in through the front door. But since we’re the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn’t have one. I”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“I know it’s hard, Peter,” she’d said. “But if you could contain your erudition and ready wit for just a little while we’d be most grateful.” “Am I allowed to be cheeky?” I’d asked. “No you’re fucking not,” said Seawoll. “I’m”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“Now, personally, I’d have been happier driving an armored personnel carrier in through the front door. But since we’re the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn’t have one.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“One Hyde Park squatted next to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel like a stack of office furniture, and with all the elegance and charm of the inside of a photocopier. Albeit a brand new photocopier that doubled as a fax and document scanner.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“Perhaps, I thought, the dead god gets folded into the existence of the new god, the way a dormant genetic variation can exist within an organism’s DNA—hanging about like an actor’s understudy until the right environmental conditions give it expression and—hey presto—suddenly a bacteria is heat resistant, our Chloe gets her big break on Broadway and a sniper for hire gets an unexpected half a meter of cold steel through the chest. Perhaps”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“So, actions were still being actioned and me and Guleed were actioning them, and the wheels of justice ground on. Albeit in first gear. So”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

“Even at ten o’clock in the morning it was going to be full of members of the public. Rich, influential members of the public, many of them foreign, a lot of them with some level of diplomatic immunity.
‘What I’m saying here,’ Seawoll had said, ‘is try to limit the amount of damage you do to none fucking whatsoever.’
I don’t know where I got this reputation for property damage, I really don’t”
― Ben Aaronovitch, quote from The Hanging Tree

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Popular quotes

“I want to be married,” I blurted. “I want you to marry me.”
Fuuuuuuuck.
And so my entire carefully constructed speech was thrown out the window. My grandmother’s antique ring was in a box in the dresser—nowhere near me—and my plan to kneel and do everything right just evaporated.
In the circle of my arms, Chloe grew very still. “What did you just say?”
I had completely botched the plan, but it was too late to turn back now.
“I know we have only been together for a little over a year,” I explained, quickly. “Maybe it’s too soon? I understand if it’s too soon. It’s just that how you feel about the way we kiss? I feel that way about everything we do together. I love it. I love to be inside you, I love working with you, I love watching you work, I love fighting with you, and I love just sitting on the couch and laughing with you. I’m lost when I’m not with you, Chloe. I can’t think of anything, or anyone, who is more important to me, every second. And so for me, that means we’re already sort of married in my head. I guess I wanted to make it official somehow. Maybe I sound like an idiot?” I looked over at her, feeling my heart try to jackhammer its way up my throat. “I never expected to feel this way about someone.”
She stared at me, eyes wide and lips parted as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. I stood and ran over to the dresser, pulling the box from the drawer and carrying it over to her. When I opened the box and let her see my grandmother’s antique diamond and sapphire ring, she clapped a hand over her mouth.
“I want to be married,” I said again. Her silence was unnerving, and fuck, I’d completely botched this with my rambling nonsense. “Married to you, I mean.”
Her eyes filled with tears and she held them, unblinking. “You. Are such. An ass.”
Well, that was unexpected. I knew it might be too soon, but an ass? Really? I narrowed my eyes. “A simple ‘It’s too soon’ would have sufficed, Chloe. Jesus. I lay my heart out on the—”
She pushed off the bed and ran over to one of her bags, rummaging through it and pulling out a small blue fabric bag. She carried it back to me with the ribbon hooked over her long index finger, and dangled the bag in my face.
I ask her to marry me and she brings me a souvenir from New York? What the fuck is that? “What the fuck is that?” I asked.
“You tell me, genius.”
“Don’t get smart with me, Mills. It’s a bag. For all I know you have a granola bar, or your tampons, in there.”
“It’s a ring, dummy. For you.”
My heart was pounding so hard and fast I half wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like. “A ring for me?”
She pulled a small box out of the bag and showed it to me. It was smooth platinum, with a line of coarse titanium running through the middle.
“You were going to propose to me?” I asked, still completely confused. “Do women even do that?”
She punched me, hard, in the arm. “Yes, you chauvinist. And you totally stole my thunder.”
“So, is that a yes?” I asked, my bewilderment deepening. “You’ll marry me?”
“You tell me!” she yelled, but she was smiling.
“Technically you haven’t asked yet.”
“Goddamnit, Bennett! You haven’t, either!”
“Will you marry me?” I asked, laughing.
“Will you marry me?”
With a growl, I took the box and dropped it on the floor, flipping her onto her back.”
― Christina Lauren, quote from Beautiful Bitch

“For me hotness was a complicated matter involving brains, humor, and some other things, but all that aside, I was willing to admit Sean Evans was nice to look at.”
― Ilona Andrews, quote from Clean Sweep

“O pão do trabalho de cada dia e o teu seio para pousar uma hora a face, pura de manchas: não pedi mais nada ao Céu. Achei-me homem aos dezasseis anos. Vi a virtude à luz do teu amor. Cuidei que era santa a paixão que absorvia todas as outras, ou as depurava com o seu fogo sagrado. Nunca os meus pensamentos foram denegridos por um desejo, que eu não possa confessar alto diante de todo o mundo. Diz tu, Teresa, se meus lábios profanaram a pureza de teus ouvidos. Pergunta a Deus quando quis eu fazer do meu amor o teu opróbrio.”
― Camilo Castelo Branco, quote from Amor de Perdição

“Everything comes home, my mother used to say; every word spoken, every shadow cast, every footprint in the sand. It can't be helped; it's part of what makes us who we are. ”
― Joanne Harris, quote from The Girl with No Shadow

“Ya writin’ a book? Hey great. Need some help? Want some of my quips? Hey, we could do it together. We’d quip ’em to death. Give ’em quiplash hee hee hee.”
― Ken Dryden, quote from The Game

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.