The Submission Quotes

"They’re a record, not a gesture," the sculptor replied.

"In the right memorial, the names won’t be the source of the emotion."

"Experiences matter more than lineages," Claire said.

"No, lineages are experiences. We’re coded to have certain emotions in certain kinds of places."

"The Garden will be a place where we—where the widows, their children, anyone—can stumble on joy."

"I’m sorry, but a memorial isn’t a graveyard. It’s a national symbol, an historic signifier, a way to make sure anyone who visits understands how it felt, what it meant."

"We disagree on the best way to bring it about," Ariana answered. "I think you have to confront the pain, face it, even wallow in it, before you can move on."

"I’ll take that under consideration," Claire retorted.

"Paul, you know there’s a whole critique out there. If we pick the wrong memorial, if we yield to sentimentalism, it only confirms—"

"Things—ideals—change only if we allow them to. And if we do, they’ve won."

"I don’t care that you’re Muslim, Mo, but I do care that you’re an asshole."

"It’s as close to being a national security issue as it can be without being a national security issue."

"Perhaps 'principle—he won!' should have ended the argument before it began, but Paul’s job was to get a memorial built, and he wouldn’t sacrifice that goal for a man named Mohammad."

"This was why he was a banker, not a wordsmith."

"The public may wonder, for example, what their memorial designer was doing in Afghanistan."

"Learning that disaster could be survived, even manipulated, freed him."

"To his great surprise—to this day it still surprised him—Paul looked back at the man without squirming or blushing or bothering to blot the stain."

"The old him kept popping up, often in his mother’s eyes."

"She also could get larcenous geometry teachers transferred to other school districts."

"He was tired of financing Jacob, but Edith was always pestering him, relentless, and Paul knew they must conspire in back-channel conversations to keep the checks coming."

"The dust he brought home was holy—he shook out his shoes and his shirt over newspapers to save it."

"The old me kept popping up, often in my mother’s eyes."

"The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury."

"You can’t just expect people’s respect," Patrick said, by way of saying Sean had lost his.

"In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid."

"She needed motives to test for untruths, vulnerabilities to extract the next nugget."

"The thrill every time she unearthed a scrap of news and held it up for the public’s inspection was as fresh as the first time."

"God was all-pervading, all-knowing, the creator, owner, and master of the universe."

"The governor, mysteriously absent at the onset of the controversy—awaiting the instant polls, Alyssa was sure—emerged to express 'grave concern' about the possibility of a Muslim memorial-builder."

"The building’s foreboding look coloring Claire’s thoughts."

"The prospect of her husband’s exclusion gnawed at Asma."

"The status of her dead husband remained as provisional as her own."

"She had the money to fly to Bangladesh and back a hundred times, but she couldn’t leave America because she might not be allowed back in."

"It wasn’t clear whether 'some people' referred to the violent Muslims or to people who slandered the peaceful ones."

"It amazed him what people talked about and what they didn’t, how clean their fingernails were, how pristine their routines."

"You all can work out the historical verities," Malik said.

"Amazing how chaotic and impossible things could seem when they were concentrated into a few pages of black-and-white print, instead of diluted into long days of red chilies drying in the sun, light dancing on the water, tales of marriages arranged and awry, the tunes of Runa Laila, her niece’s sweet laugh, her mother’s spicy fish, her father’s comic stories of waking the sleeping guards at his rice mill, the swaddled peace of daydreams."

"Bravery, she thought as she walked, wasn’t about strength alone. It required opportunity. Wars came rarely."

"It’s awful," a thirty-two-year-old music executive who declined to give her name told The New York Observer, "There’s this primal feeling in my gut saying ‘No’ to it, even though my brain is saying ‘Yes’—sort of like when you think you want to have sex with someone and your body won’t cooperate; or you think you don’t and your body cooperates too much—and I don’t get where it’s coming from. It’s like I’ve been invaded. But what can I say? I don’t have good reasons. It just makes me uncomfortable, and being uncomfortable makes me even more uncomfortable."

"If it turns out to be true, it would be unconstitutional to allow the establishment of any religion on public land."

"Grief was not a country she had chosen to enter, but she could choose when to leave, even if joining the diaspora bore the taint of treason. Out there the dead were still remembered, but with less feeling."

"From the boat Manhattan had no sound, like a television turned to mute, but around them the wind whipped the water, which slapped the boat, and the tourists laughed and shrieked, and the cries of the white gulls dropped down like loose feathers."

"Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you."

"The ability to know, having to know, what was going on in lives not your own or your family’s, so that sometimes it was hard to know where your own thoughts left off and others’ began."

"The sense that she had been outdone by malevolent forces nagged at her."

"I’m not scared, and everyone else is—scared to speak because they’ll be called anti or phobic or racist or whatever."

"Horrible as the attack was, everyone wanted a little of its ash on their hands."

"The description of paradise in the Quran is just a way to convey to our limited imaginations the ecstasy we will feel in God’s presence."

"It’s about God. God. The description of paradise in the Quran is just a way to convey to our limited imaginations the ecstasy we will feel in God’s presence."

"It’s hard to be an architect on your own—you must know what I mean. You can’t just sit in your room and draw, it’s like trying to make children through masturbation."

"The world was upside down. He was half god, half freak."

"In any garden, more is happening than you know, than you see. Something is always changing, being changed, outside our grasp."

"The gardens of paradise are for men like my husband, who never hurt anyone."

"I think a garden is right because that is what America is—all the people Muslim and non-Muslim, who have come and grown together."

"You care for widows and orphans, as Mr. Nasruddin has done for me and my child."

"What history do you want to write with this memorial?"

"Fear has justified war, torture, secrecy, all kinds of violations of rights and liberties. Don't let it justify taking the memorial away from Khan."

"Their presence at that rally was their way of telling me, ‘You let us down, betrayed us.’ I have an obligation to understand their point of view."

"Sometimes I feel like I’ve got one leg in New York and one in America."

"We need to figure out how to weigh all of the families’ competing views."

"We were grateful for that building. We are grateful. We have all tried to give back to America."

"I abstain because I don’t know," she said. The silence that followed felt like a pinhole in history.

"You don’t have any votes yet," Paul, severe at last, told Ariana.

"Claire needs time to sort through her confusion," he said.

"Good news, bad news," Reiss spit without greeting. Mo waited, strangely calm.

"I worked so hard to convince you of your specialness," she said. "It would have been better to let you think you were ordinary."

"Once he told me: ‘Asma cannot speak English, but she has a very good mind.’"

"It’s only the ones with the big beards you have to worry about," Junior went on.

"Let her speak," as if Asma now stood for Muslim women across the globe.

"She is hurt!" someone shouted in Bengali. "Find a doctor!"

"You should be grateful to me. If I hadn’t broken this story, they would have buried your memorial—you would never have known that you won."

"I’ve never asked much of you, Sean," she said. "But I asked you for this, begged you to stop this memorial."

"The reasoning has to be defensible in court," Harold said.

"I am an American. That’s the only quote I’m going to give you. I am an American."

"He created an Islamic paradise!" she snapped. "If nothing else, we should deny him for being an idiot."

"We, the undersigned, are asking Mohammad Khan to withdraw his memorial design so that the country can unite around a different memorial."

"You assume we all must think like them unless we prove otherwise."

"It’s just that—it’s hard for me to have you design the memorial if I don’t know what you think."

"Be careful!" Mo said. The cameraman, like an overexcited Labrador, had nearly knocked over a folio of Persian miniatures displayed on a stand.

"It’s wrong. It’s not fair to Paul. No one could have handled the process better than he did. It was an impossible situation."

"But I didn’t give in—withdraw—because he asked me to," Mo protested over Edith’s speech.

"It’s an awfully convenient way of looking at things," Mo said. "Everything he did was right, even the things that were wrong, because it all turned out well in the end."

"She loves him," the cameraman said. "Loved him, I guess."

"I sometimes feel each place is the wrong place," the young man on the screen said softly.

"I am bitter," he thought, and, sensing that the words were on the verge of escaping his lips, pressed them shut.

"Everyone’s full of regrets," Molly said elliptically.

"I would not have entered," he said to the camera now. "That was the original mistake—the original sin, perhaps."

"It’s a commission," William pointed out. "I don’t think he had a choice."

"He must at least have agreed to it," Claire said.

"We don’t know what it says," Molly said abruptly.

"Use your imagination," he said. Claire heard his words, closed her eyes, tried to see her husband’s name.

"Mom—are you still with us? I want you to see one more thing."