Mark Boal Quotes

Like most New Yorkers I was shell-shocked immediately after 9/11 and couldn't put into words what I was feeling.

The last four years have not diluted the memory or weakened the resolve of our citizens. Four years later, our hearts still hurt for the families whose loved ones were murdered that day.

I was at Ground Zero, and it was, to me, such a graphic illustration of what terrorism has done to our world.

As one who participated in all the wars of the state of Israel, I saw the horror of wars. I saw the fear of wars. I saw my best friends being killed in battles. I was seriously injured twice.

I was in New York City on 9/11. Grief remains from that awful day, but not only grief. There is fear, too, a fear informed by the knowledge that whatever my worst nightmare is, there is someone out there embittered enough to carry it out.

We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly.

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

I had just moved to New York in September 2001, and immediately 9/11 happened, and of course it completely changed the city and everybody who lived there.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

I visited the Pentagon a few days after September 11, and I still remember so vividly the smell of terror surrounding the entire building and complex. I was angry that such a brutal act of violence was committed against innocent people.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

You rarely hear women crying in Grozney. They have cried their eyes out long ago.

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

I think 9/11 affected everybody in one way or another.

After the attacks on September 11th, we all learned lessons.

Sept. 11, 2001, still feels like a blur to me. I wish it were simply a bad, re-occurring dream, but unfortunately it isn't.

If you want proof of what the country is really all about, just walk through the National September 11 Memorial Museum. Here it is, in the faces of the victims, in the stories of bravery, in the souls and memory of the survivors, the next of kin.

There's nothing but brutality and bravery or cowardice that comes out of war. That's pretty much it.

After 9/11, you kind of didn't want to open up your heart to more pain.

The tragedy of September 11th was so sudden, so enormous, and so horrendous, both in terms of lives lost and global consequences, that this country and the world went into immediate and prolonged shock.

As a combat veteran, I know the cost of war.

The atmosphere is different in Congress after September 11. Terrorism is no longer an abstract issue, but a real, tangible threat.

The devastating punch we took on September 11th still reverberates throughout American society.

Revenge by young men is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old men who stay at home in times of war, and mothers who have sons to lose, know better.

September 11 awoke us to the threat of terrorism. It was forever bookmarked in our history as the day when life as Americans knew it, changed forever.