Fall and Rise Quotes

“Two-year-old Christine Hanson and four-year-old Juliana McCourt would never visit Disneyland. Neither they nor David Gamboa-Brandhorst would know first days of school, first loves, or any other milestone, from triumph to heartbreak, of a full life. Andrea LeBlanc would never again travel the world with her gregarious, pacifist husband, Bob. Julie Sweeney wouldn’t bear children, grow old, and feel safe with her confident warrior husband, Brian. Delayed passengers wouldn’t hear recitals of Forrest Gump dialogue from Captain Victor Saracini. First Officer Michael Horrocks’s daughter wouldn’t rise from bed with the promise that her daddy loved her to the moon. Ace Bailey and Mark Bavis would never again share their gifts with young hockey players or with their own families. Retired nurse Touri Bolourchi, who’d fled Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini, wouldn’t see her grandsons grow up as Americans.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good, go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you, and [anticipating heaven or an afterlife] I’ll see you when you get there. ’Bye, babe. Hope I’ll call you.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“In their Connecticut home, Lee and Eunice Hanson watched the televised explosion of the plane carrying their son, Peter, daughter-in-law, Sue Kim, and granddaughter, Christine. The strike into the South Tower ended the Airfone call between Peter and Lee. Later, Eunice realized: “We heard his first cries and his last cries.” They endured the unspeakable, and yet they endured.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“No one on the radio told him that responders could devote unlimited manpower to the fourteen people inside Stairwell B because they comprised the largest single group of known survivors.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“she was a bookkeeper for the Port Authority, one week shy of her sixtieth birthday. She had limped down about one thousand steps from the 73rd floor, hobbled by fallen arches, a bad leg from having been hit by a car several months earlier, and assorted maladies. An office manager and others had helped Josephine to get this far, but she could go no farther and had sent her helpers ahead to safety. Now she was alone.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“Lieutenant Commander David Tarantino, MD, hurt, sore, pungent as an ashcan, limped several blocks to a Metro rail station. He paid the fare and boarded a train toward home. As he reflected on all that he’d seen and done, Dave noticed a woman staring at him from a few seats away. She studied his scrapes and bruises, the burns on his hands. Her gaze worked its way down his torn, stained uniform to his ruined shoes.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“He wondered what drove Dave Tarantino into that brick oven to crawl through jagged rubble, flip onto his back, and leg-press a load of burning debris, knowing that it might crash down on top of him. Dave Thomas decided that he’d never seen a more courageous act. But it worried him—he feared that Dave Tarantino”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“Alone on the floor of his elevator car, oblivious to everything beyond the walls of his box, Chris Young occasionally heard loud cries amid sirens and fire alarms. Nothing sounded like human agony, only some kind of vague emergency unfolding nearby. He knew nothing of planes or fires or people falling and jumping to their deaths.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“firefighters cannot extinguish a fire in a twenty- or thirty-thousand-square-foot open floor area in a high-rise building. A fire company advancing a 2½-inch hoseline with a 1¼-inch nozzle discharges only three hundred gallons per minute and can extinguish only about twenty-five hundred square feet of fire.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“On September 11, 2001, the FAA’s “no-fly list” included a grand total of twelve names.25 By contrast, the State Department’s so-called TIPOFF terrorist watchlist included sixty thousand names. Yet the FAA’s head of civil aviation security didn’t even know that the State Department list existed.26 Two names on that State Department list were Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, both on board Flight 77.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“With time, news becomes history. And history, it’s been said, is what happens to other people.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“Queens. The trash-strewn lot saddened Carlos, who told Cecilia he thought it would make a fine place for a father to toss a ball or enjoy a milkshake with his child. The City of New York acquired the property in 2007. Today it is an oasis of green space and flowering trees, a haven for city parents and children, named Carlos R. Lillo Park.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“Roughly three thousand children6 under age eighteen lost a parent on 9/11, including 108 babies born in the months after their father’s death.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“Within weeks of the attacks, the United States went to war in Afghanistan, a conflict that continues at this writing. The war in Iraq followed, starting in 2003 and officially ending in 2011.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“Jay saw no sign of the more than twenty-seven hundred people22 who’d arrived at the Twin Towers that morning as workers, visitors, or emergency responders, or as airplane passengers and crew, but who’d soon be counted among the departed.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“Flecks of dust twinkled in the beam, like a sudden spotlight on a darkened stage. Jay stared at it until comprehension dawned. “Guys,” Jay said. “There used to be one hundred and six floors above us, and now I’m seeing sunshine.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“Within six minutes of the crash,35 the first person fell or jumped. At least 110 more lives would end that way from the upper stories of the North Tower.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“JoAnne told Lyz: “Make him . . . make him brave.” She repeated the phrase, almost like a benediction: “Make him brave.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11

“Then, just as Brian Sweeney had tried to reassure his wife and mother, Peter Hanson sought to comfort his father: “Don’t worry, Dad. If it happens, it’ll be very fast.”
― Mitchell Zuckoff, Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11