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" 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 (The Last Policeman, #2)
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" Because just imagine--just imaging the alternative, the world in which a man encounters some scrap of information, about the murder rate in his neighborhood, or about the presence of troops on the northern border, or what time the bus is supposed to come--any of the small and large pieces of information a person encounters in the course of a day or a lifetime, personal or political, substantive or trivial--and then the next hour or the next day he hears something different, and it is impossible, literally impossible, to know which version is the real one. "
― Ben H. Winters , Golden State