G. Willow Wilson Quotes

Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts--its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones. Ramadan, Muharram, the Eids; you associate no religious event with the tang of snow in the air, or spring thaw, or the advent of summer. God permeates these things--as the saying goes, Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty--but they are transient. Forced to concentrate on the eternal, you begin to see, or think you see, the bones and sinews of the world beneath its seasonal flesh. The sun and moon become formidable clockwork. They are transient also, but hint at the dark planes that stretch beyond the earth in every direction, full of stars and dust, toward a retreating, incomprehensible edge

~ G. Willow Wilson

The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me. That unified force was a god too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion.

~ G. Willow Wilson

So the stories aren't just stories, is what you're saying. They're really secret knowledge disguised as stories.One could say that of all stories, younger brother.

~ G. Willow Wilson

Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states and without contradiction

~ G. Willow Wilson

What naive garbage. People don't want freedom anymore--even those to whom freedom is a kind of religion are afraid of it, like trembling acolytes who make sacrifices to some pagan god. People want their governments to keep secrets from them. They want the hand of law to be brutal. They are so terrified by their own power that they will vote to have it taken out of their hands. Look at America. Look at the sharia states. Freedom is a dead philosophy, Alif. The world is returning to its natural state, to the rule of the weak by the strong. Young as you are, it's you who are out of touch, not me.

~ G. Willow Wilson

The few Americans he had encountered in his lifetime had all seemed flat to him, as if freedom weakened one's capacity for intense emotion by demanding too little of it.

~ G. Willow Wilson

The only power worth a snot is the power to get up after you fall down.

~ G. Willow Wilson

It's not the size of the girl in the fight that counts... it's the size of the fight in the girl! -MISS MARVEL

~ G. Willow Wilson

Nobody as the right to give up on a whole generation before it's even had a right to prove itself.

~ G. Willow Wilson

I suppose every innovation started out as a fantasy.

~ G. Willow Wilson

You always have a choice. You can't stop what's coming, but you can decide how you meet it. The fate of the world is out of your hands. It always was. But your fate--what you decide to do right now-- is still up to you.

~ G. Willow Wilson

All translations are made up opined Vikram, Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something

~ G. Willow Wilson

Good is not a thing you are. It is a thing you do.

~ G. Willow Wilson

Love the life you have been given. And be humbled by it. It is not to be despised.

~ G. Willow Wilson

Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.

~ G. Willow Wilson

Be careful with this one said Dina, bending down to greet the cat. All cats are half jinn, but I think she's three quarters.

~ G. Willow Wilson

He's holding my hand! A boy is holding my hand! This is happening! I should let go. I should blush and act shy. Like a girl from the movies. But that's not what I do. I hold on.

~ G. Willow Wilson

For most inhabitants of the Arab world, the prevailing cultural attitude toward women - fed and encouraged by Wahhabi doctrine, which is based on Bedouin social norms rather than Islamic jurisprudence - often trumps the rights accorded to women by Islam.

~ G. Willow Wilson

The transition between life in red-state America and life in the Arab capital was at times overwhelming because of the traditional segregation of men and women in many public and private settings.

~ G. Willow Wilson

An ambitious, surreal tale of the love between a young Arab girl sold into marriage and the orphan boy she adopts, 'Habibi' spans multiple eras of conflict and change, stretching the lifetimes of its two protagonists over many centuries.

~ G. Willow Wilson

'Air' is what the world looks like: An inconvenient mashup of human politics and divine geography. We leave bits and pieces of ourselves and our history in every place we encounter.

~ G. Willow Wilson

I have younger friends who are in this pinch where they feel they've been counted out before they've had a chance to prove themselves. They've inherited a lot of debt - not just student debt but environmental debt, political debt. They really feel squeezed.

~ G. Willow Wilson