„A San Francisco husband slept through his wife’s call from the World Trade Center. The tower was burning around her, and she was speaking on her mobile phone. She left her last message to him on the answering machine. A TV station played it to us, while it showed the husband standing there listening. Somehow, he was able to bear hearing it again. We heard her tell him through her sobbing that there was no escape for her; the building was on fire; there was no way down the stairs. She was calling to say goodbye. There was really only one thing for her to say, those three words that all the terrible art, the worst pop songs in movies, the most seductive lies, can somehow never cheapen: ‘I love you.’

She said it over and again before the line went dead. And that is what they were all saying down their phones – from the hijacked planes and the burning towers. There was only love and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers.“

(Aus einem Artikel von Ian McEwan, The Guardian, 15.9.2001, wiedergefunden durch einen Artikel im Spiegel und in einem Frontline-Interview, das auf der Seite Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero steht, die ein Jahr nach den Anschlägen eingerichtet wurde)