"The whole thing looks different now. Every day, they take shit away and it just never comes back. Take it to Fresh Kills and squeeze it like orange juice until all the paper and blood comes out and then they go back for another truckload." He spoke in a low groan. "They're gonna take it all away, Bri. All of it. The paper gets filed, bits of flesh buried, and you know who gets the steel ? The mob. Goddamn bosses give all the steel to the mob. Everyone gets a piece a this thing." [...]

"I just wanna tell'em, 'Leave it!' You know ? Leave the shit. Everything. The piles and mounds. What's the fuggin' rush ? Let me and the smokers spend the rest of our lives going through it one piece at a time if we want."

"And suddenly, Remy thought he could see the world clearly. He had tried to go along, waiting for the fog to clear, for the terrain to make sense. But what if it never cleared ? Then a word spoke itself in his head, as if not from him, but from outside.
Act, it said. Act." (p. 306)

"Our main characters are Salwa and Jassim. We really come to know them only after the World Trade Center buildings have been flattened by planes, flown by Arabs, by Muslims. Salwa and Jassim are both Arabs. Both Muslims. But of course they have nothing to do with what happened to the World Trade Center. Nothing and everything." (pp.VII-VIII)

"There were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his." (p. 256)"I want to stop inventing. If I could know how he died, exactly how he died, I wouldn’t have to invent him dying inside an elevator that was stuck between floors, which happened to some people, and I wouldn’t have to imagine him trying to crawl down the outside of the building, which I saw a video of one person doing on a Polish site, or trying to use a tablecloth as a parachute, like some of the people who were in Windows in the World actually did." (p. 257)

"These are the translations of horror when it enters the mind and the body, and they seem to speak more directly to the truth than the elegant phrases we have been hearing lately, both political and literary. We have to talk, but we should be careful with our words." (p.159)

"Our job is to be epic and tiny, both. Three thousand lives in New York had just disintegrated into the air. Nobody could have known it for certain then, but hundreds of thousand of lives would hang in the balance — in Baghdad, Kabul, London, Madrid, Basra. The ordinary shoves up against the monumental. When big things fall, they shatter into fragments. They crash down and scatter over a very large landscape."

Colum McCann, "Dessert", The New Yorker, September 12, 2011, p. 25.

"Sam had to come home. There was a war on. A wisp of satisfaction, of comfort, crept into Edith's heart. Manhattan was finished. Sam would have to come home, be content with this house, this land, her company. She had foolishly allowed Sam a long leash. This attack was an omen, or a portent. Things had to be set right." (p.146-147)