Matt Gallagher Quotes

Sept. 11 jolted America out of its second gilded age.

You spend your childhood wanting to get out from your house and wanting to get away and out into the real world, and then as adults, we start to learn that things are not what we thought they were.

I'm a New Yorker. I was there during 9/11 and I saw how, not only New York City stopped for a moment, we all took an inhale and exhale at the same time - the world united at that time, and it changed my life.

When that second airplane hit the building, we all changed. We need to get back to some serious thinking.

For some reason, 1968 is a touchstone year for me. I think it was the first year I felt fully conscious.

9/11 was basically caused by box cutters, and that changed the world.

But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.

I definitely subscribe to the idea that 9/11, to use an overused phrase, was a wake-up call. There was a year-long national teach-in on Islam - everyone read books and suddenly talked about Islam, and that was very productive. But there's no doubt that moment has passed.

I'm interested in how innocence fares when it collides with hard reality.

Like many other people of my generation, I don't think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn't ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on.

I don't want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife.

Ultimately, if you look at all my films from 'Bloody Sunday' on, they're steeped in a post-9/11 atmosphere. 'United 93' is directly about 9/11, of course, but every one of the movies deals with paranoia, mistrust, and fear.

Since September 11, 2001, the real world has become too scary for a lot of people to be with - all the time.

I regret losing my innocence so early.

Writers are not obliged to deal with current events, but it happens that the big story of our times - the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - is being told in some of the greatest books of our time.

I went to New York to train as a chef, and I had the good or bad fortune, depending on how you describe it, of being right there during 9/11. It was one of the best and the worst experiences.

When I was a young student, I thought grow-ups would come and make things work. Now I realize that grown-ups are just kids with wrinkles.

Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things. As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it.

I couldn't stop bawling, watching the towers come down. it was a terrible thing to happen. And a terrible thing to realize that I don't sit though the nigh crying when such horrors happen all the time.

Not to remember 9/11, is to forget what brought it about.

In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world

For many of us, the curtain had just come down on childhood.

I feel like there's a moment, in every young girl's life, whether it happens with your family, or a tragedy or death in your family, or a relationship, where there's a turning point where you go from extremely hopeful and cheery to wondering whether you are okay with where you are. That's always awkward.

… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.