‘Of course, there is little evidence that America’s most wanted Saudi-born millionaire has a grudge against capitalism (if Osama bin Laden’s rather impressive global export network stretching from cash-crop agriculture to oil pipelines is any indication, it seems unlikely). And yet for the movement some people call “anti-globalisation” others call “anti-capitalism” (and I tend to just sloppily call “the movement”), it’s difficult to avoid discussions about symbolism: about all the anti-corporate signs and signifiers – the culture-jammed logos, the guerrilla-warfare stylings, the choices of brand name and political targets – that make up the movement’s dominant metaphors. Many political opponents of anti-corporate activism are using the symbolism of the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks to argue that young activists, playing at guerrilla war, have now been caught out by a real war.’

‘What changes after a hinge is our stories of ourselves. Who we are, how we got that way, where we’re headed, and what makes us tick. The lesson is that any cultural revolution represents a grand new alignment of great forces — technological, economic, environmental and spiritual. These shape the tales we tell to make sense of our new world.’

‘Together the carriers have recreated, in miniature, a semblance of their old routes. The World Trade Centre buildings were allotted sorting areas ringed with dozens and dozens of beige and grey metal pigeonholes to accept the buildings’ mail.Thornton’s cubicle is marked with a large sign that reads “1 World Trade Centre” in bold black letters. Each of the companies on her old route has its own pigeonhole. She sits in this cramped, dim space for eight hours a day sorting mail. When a pigeonhole fills up, workers come and dump the overflow into large, marked crates. Thornton says she doesn’t want to feel ungrateful. After all, she is alive and getting a pay cheque. But most days she feels lost and disorientated. She misses the din of the building, the rush of the lifts, the friendly chats in the lobbies. “I have no place to go,” she says. “It is like I am homeless.”‘

‘On television, the towers fall in slow motion. The same crowds of people stand around on the West Side Highway, observing. There’s the same jiggling, chaotic shot taken by some cameraman fleeing the cloud of dust. Watching this, David says: “This is worse than The Blair Witch Project.” Then he asks: “They ever find that intern, Chandra Levy??”‘

‘Many More Wild Cards. This is neither an “age of terror” nor an “age of freedom”. This is an age of random calamities. It’s a genuine end of history, in which the passage of time in human affairs no longer has any rules as we previously understood them. There is no great historical narrative at hand, nor is there any grand scheme by which a rational analyst can make useful sense of events. NYC 9.11 is quickly eclipsed by other, biggest factors even more untoward and shocking: perhaps dumber acts of terror by even smaller groups, plus some Greenhouse calamities, an asteroid strike, some brand-new plagues, or even free beer and five cent nano-genetic intelligent cigars. Humankind has lost all control of our destiny and nothing can restore it. Probability: 3%’

‘Generals and military scholars will tell you that eight or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history — which is no doubt true — but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a war-time economy are going to feel like a Lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed. That is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what’s coming now. The party’s over, folks’

‘The stylised television footage and photographs of Bin Laden suggest a man of homoerotic narcissism, and maybe we can draw a grain of hope from that. Posing with a Kalashnikov, attending a wedding or consulting a sacred text, he radiates with every self-adoring gesture an actor’s awareness of the lens. He has height, beauty, grace, intelligence and magnetism, all great attributes unless you’re the world’s hottest fugitive and on the run, in which case they’re liabilities hard to disguise. But greater than all of them, to my jaded eye, is his barely containable male vanity, his appetite for self-drama and his closet passion for the limelight. And just possibly this trait will be his downfall, seducing him into a final dramatic act of self-destruction, produced, directed, scripted and acted to death by Osama Bin Laden himself.’

‘ …when a handful of fanatics carrying knives succeeded in gaining control over the advanced flight technology of the Boeing company and hurtling it into the advanced engineering technology that built and maintained the Twin Towers, they created a vast metaphor of appalling consequence. They made it clear to everyone who still didn’t get it that the story of the 21st century is going to be that of the enemies of the West using the technology of the West in order to strike at the West. What this fact signifies is that not only individual fanatics but fanatic states and fanatic sub-cultures are liable to shatter, within only a few years, the Euro-American monopoly on power. If they are not stopped immediately, they will try to undermine the foundations of the West by using levers of force that originate in the West itself.’

‘We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. And now, when I finish a long day of CNN-related fear and loathing mixed with eyeballing my own resolutely white screen, I do not crawl into bed with 500-page comic novels about (God help me, but it’s OK; I’m going to call on the safety of quote marks) “multicultural” London. I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis’s essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn’t sound like me.’

‘The Authority will not appear in any form we recognize for some time to come. Because for it to work, it must be callous. It must be horrible, and violent, and must be gleeful about what it’s doing. If it’s not cranked up to ridiculous volume, viciously insulting to the genre that spawned it and blatantly absurd in its scale and its disregard for human life… it’s just another superhero team book. You can find those anywhere. Unfortunately, the clash between the Authority style and the real-life events and attitudes surrounding it means that, at least for a little while, it’ll have to be just another superhero team book. If it’s going to be published at all. Personally, I think the audience is ready for it. It’s escapism, and it’s revenge fantasy on the biggest possible scale. But the people who make the decisions clearly believe otherwise.’ — Warren Ellis.

Anthony Giddens: ‘You have to see this in terms of a certain continuity. There have been a range of terror attacks over the last 10 to 15 years, including suicide attacks, and while this event is so massive that it has made a tremendous impact on the public, it is connected to a very long history deeply intertwined with the Cold War. It is very important to avoid altogether the discourse of the “clash of civilisations” – not because it’s wholly untrue, but because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a dangerous idea that becomes part of what it is supposed to describe. The clash, instead, is between a range of different fundamentalisms and the more cosmopolitan world society most of us would like to build. So the response to this should be more globalisation, more co-operation, more recognition of global interdependence. Because among the fundamentalists you have a global network, too, part and parcel of the very things to which they claim to be opposed.’

‘Just two weeks ago, in New York, after the church service I met some of the families of the British victims. It was in many ways a very British occasion. Tea and biscuits. It was raining outside. Around the edge of the room, strangers making small talk, trying to be normal people in an abnormal situation. And as you crossed the room, you felt the longing and sadness; hands clutching photos of sons and daughters, wives and husbands; imploring you to believe them when they said there was still an outside chance of their loved ones being found alive, when you knew in truth that all hope was gone. And then a middle-aged mother looks you in the eyes and tells you her only son has died, and asks you: why? I tell you: you do not feel like the most powerful person in the country at times like that. Because there is no answer. There is no justification for their pain. Their son did nothing wrong. The woman, seven months pregnant, whose child will never know its father, did nothing wrong. They don’t want revenge. They want something better in memory of their loved ones.’