Alan Jackson Quotes

[9/11] was not meant to be argued with. It wasn't part of any negotiation. No message was intended with it. It spoke for itself, which is unusual.

Unfortunately I was in New York when 9/11 happened.

I have the deepest regret about 9/11. Sept. 11, 2001, was one of the most difficult days I've ever had. I was in Lima, Peru, and had to fly back eight hours not knowing what happened in my own country, knowing thousands of my fellow citizens had died.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were spectacular, riveting, grim, costly and searing. The shock that they caused reverberated throughout the world. What happened in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania ended the lives of thousands of people and changed the lives of many more. But they did not change the world.

On the morning of September 11th, I was literally about 18 blocks from the World Trade Center. I witnessed in person what a lot of people witnessed in person, but what the world really saw on the television screen, I saw it with my own eyes that morning.

We came back right over the World Trade Center and could see, even from that altitude, the devastation, the smoke that was coming up. It was obvious it was going to be horrible.

We were trying to get all of the planes down out of the sky. And we watched as the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed - something no one expected and anticipated. And you could sit there and see and be aware that thousands of people were at that moment being killed as a result of the terrorist attacks that struck the United States.

The World Trade Center was the target for the world, and they hit the target.

I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.

Note that there was no claim for these attacks [on 9/11]. There were no demands. There were no statements. It was a silent piece of terror.

I'm an American so its kind of hard for me to talk about 9/11. So whenever someone brings it up in a conversation, I say "I didn't like 9/11."

September 11, 2001: Citizens of the U.S., besieged by terror’s sting, rose up, weeping glory, as if on eagles’ wings.--from the poem Angel of Remembrance: Candles for September 11, 2001

We live in downtown Manhattan and we have pretty big windows that looked right at the World Trade Center. I was home along with Kai and we watched it all happen. I was holding him in my arms and we were looking out the window when the second plane hit.

I watched the Trade Center buildings go down from my balcony, and it was a terrifying moment. I couldn't get my mind around it at all.

I remember waking up Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, to my wife telling me to put on the TV because I wasn't going to be going into N.Y.C. as planned. Dream Theater was working in N.Y.C. at the time mixing our album 'Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence,' and I would've been driving in that afternoon for our session.

We all lived through September 11. I was here at the Capitol that day. I saw the evil of our enemies written in the smoke rising above the Pentagon.

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.

We did exactly what everybody in the country did, watching it. You entered this state of sort of denials. You think, well, it must have been a tragic accident by an amateur pilot. And then you see the next plane coming.

Initially, the horrific images of September 11th triggered an enormous wave of solidarity.

I was living near the Twin Towers on 9/11, so I saw the attacks, and I had friends who were killed in the attacks.

On 11 September, I was living in Greenwich Village, New York; my children learned to tell south from north by looking at the World Trade Center.

March 11, 2004, now occupies a place in the history of infamy.

September 11 stands on its own as a terrible tragedy.

I will never forget the bright September day, standing at my desk in the White House, when my young assistant said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center - and then a second one - and a third, the Pentagon.

My wife had taken off on a plane. Two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center. I, of course, like any other person, felt potentially devastated, panicky a little bit.