Countdown City Quotes

“Respectfully, sir, the asteroid did not make you leave her. The asteroid is not making anyone do anything. It's just a big piece of rock floating through space. Anything anyone does remains their own decision.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“Because a promise is a promise, Officer Cavatone, and civilization is just a bunch of promises, that’s all it is. A mortgage, a wedding vow, a promise to obey the law, a pledge to enforce it. And now the world is falling apart, the whole rickety world, and every broken promise is a small rock tossed at the wooden side of its tumbling form.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“every choice forecloses on other choices; each step forward leaves a thousand dead possible universes behind you.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“There is an aspect of my character that tends to latch on to one difficult but potentially solvable problem, rather than grapple with the vast and unsolvable problem that would be all I could see, if I were to look up, figuratively speaking, from my small blue notebooks.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“It’s maddening; he’s like an obnoxious seven-year-old that someone has installed at the helm of a vast international conspiracy.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“civilization is just a bunch of promises, that’s all it is.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“One does not contemplate failure, or even death, when one believes oneself to be on a crusade.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“This then will be the shape and the feel of the world: an abandoned shell, signs of old life, curious animals wandering in and out of ruins, the wilderness crowding in, overtaking all human structures and human things.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“At lunch yesterday, McGully told us a story he heard, where the husband and wife were out for a walk in White Park, and the woman just runs, literally runs, leaps over a hedge and disappears into the distance. “She said, ‘Can you hold my ice cream a sec?’ ” McGully said, laughing, bellowing, pounding the table. “Poor dummy standing there with two ice creams.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“In Dimond Library, on the way to the basement stairs, I see a pale boy hunched over a desk in the carrel, sipping from a Styrofoam cup, surrounded by books, reading. His face is gaunt and his hair a greasy mess. On the ground beside him is a clotted leaking pile of discarded teabags and beside him a bucket that I realize with horror is full of urine. There's a tall stack of books on one side of him and a taller stack on the other: out pile, in pile. I stand for a second watching this guy, frozen in place but alive with small action: muttering to himself as he reads, almost humming like an electric motor, his hands twitching at the edges of the pages, until with a sudden flash of motion, he turns the page, flings it over like he can't consume the words fast enough.

"Come on," says Nico, and we continue down the hall, passing four more of these carrels, each with its quiet, intent occupant-- earnestly, frantically reading.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“lip. I have a sudden vivid picture of the earth as flat, a tray, covered in marbles, and someone is tilting it, and the marbles are rolling, cascading, from east to west.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“you can really see it, with an overdose, you can watch the light dripping out of someone’s eyes.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“It’s like a concert with no stage, no bands, no electricity; a concert that’s all audience.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“And surely some large proportion of the world’s current danger and decline is not inevitable but rather the result of people scrambling fearfully away from the things that have long made sense.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“4. People talk about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, like it just happened one day. All the dinosaurs were hanging out, all together in an open field, and the asteroid slammed down and destroyed them, killed them all and all at once. Not so, of course. Some died on the day, no doubt about it, and probably a lot—but the whole business took years. Generations, maybe. They can’t say for sure. They know that a ten-kilometer”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“violently arguing over a battered Falcons football helmet. The proprietors of the rummage rush over,”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“energetic rumormonger who calls himself Dan Dan the Radio Man.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“Pure uncomplicated summertime.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“You're like a monster, dude'", he says, light amusement coloring his strained voice. "'From a monster movie. The man who would not fucking quit”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“would strap you, hands and feet, to a machine, turn a wheel to make you talk. Or even not to, just to watch you experience it. Or because there was someone visiting the court who had never gotten a chance to see the machine in action. Another one of those things that makes you think, well, okay, the end of the human race, what are you gonna do?”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“Radical social theories when put into practice have a notoriously short half-life. They dissolve into anarchy. Or the people’s power, even when carefully delegated to provisional authorities, is seized by totalitarians and autocrats. Can you think of a single counterexample?” Julia flicks her gaze at me. “No,” I say. “I guess not.” “No,” she says. “There isn’t one.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“Oh, honey,” says Ellen, glaring at Cortez, laying her hatchet down at last and putting an arm around Martha. “He paid us to take care of you. Until afterward.” “Take care of?” says Martha, eyes wide. “What does that mean?” “It means, give a bunch of fucking shit to.” Cortez sidles over to their side of the room and scoops up the big knife. “It means, not let to become dead.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“Radical social theories when put into practice have a notoriously short half-life. They dissolve into anarchy. Or the people’s power, even when carefully delegated to provisional authorities, is seized by totalitarians and autocrats.”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“Forever doesn’t mean forever anymore I said ‘forever’ but it doesn’t look like I’m gonna be around much anymore.” —Elvis Costello, “Riot Act”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City

“they”
― Ben H. Winters, Countdown City