Time & Perspective Quote by Richard Price

Price frames 9/11 less as a plot point than as a moral law of realism: if you set your story in New York and pretend the skyline didn’t tear, you’re not being selective, you’re falsifying. The double negative - “you can’t not” - is doing heavy lifting. It’s the language of compulsion, of a writer cornered by history. Not writing about 9/11 isn’t neutrality; it’s an active erasure.

The detail about the protagonist’s view - Statue of Liberty and the Trade Center - is quietly brutal. Those landmarks aren’t just scenery; they’re symbolic infrastructure. Liberty beside global finance, both visible from a window, makes a whole civic myth feel stable. After 9/11, even the act of looking out becomes charged: every ordinary day in that setting carries a before-and-after embedded in the horizon. Price’s point is that character psychology, ambient dread, humor, small talk, police work, romance - all of it - would be inflected by the knowledge of what happened and what could happen again.

He also resists the prestige-tragedy trap. “It doesn’t have to take over” is a warning against turning catastrophe into narrative dominance or pious wallpaper. Acknowledgment, for Price, is craft discipline: write the city honestly, let the event occupy the space it actually took up in people’s lives - omnipresent, yet uneven; sometimes foreground, often a shadow on the wall. That’s the subtext: authenticity isn’t about grand speeches, it’s about refusing the convenience of amnesia.