G. Willow Wilson Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by G. Willow Wilson.
Famous Quotes By G. Willow Wilson
I keep setting the bar higher for myself in terms of what I'm trying to accomplish. — G. Willow Wilson
I don't want to compare myself to somebody like Fitzgerald or Hemingway, but I feel like, for some writers, going to a certain city, a certain place, is what kickstarts your imaginative process. — G. Willow Wilson
God, in His mercy, tells us that a good deed is recorded as soon as a person decides to perform it, while a bad deed is only recorded after it has been performed. — G. Willow Wilson
The more you put out there, the more you have to resolve. 'Air' is the most literary comic I've written so far, and that poses problems. — G. Willow Wilson
In all likelihood, you've been treated by a Muslim doctor or served by a Muslim waiter or worked beside a Muslim computer programmer. Even if you think, 'I don't know any Muslims,' it's probably not true. — G. Willow Wilson
A story is a story, and one may glean from it what one likes. Good sense need not enter into it. — 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
Many of us prefer to live in places abandoned by humans. Less work for us. Detroit is very popular. — G. Willow Wilson
Kamala: You're WOLVERINE! My Wolverine-and-Storm-in-space fanfic was the third-most upvoted story on Freaking Awesome last month!
Logan: Oh my God.
Kamala: I had you guys fighting this giant alien blob that farts wormholes!
Logan: Sounds great, kid.
[pause]
Logan: Wait
so what was the MOST upvoted story?
Kamala: Umm ... Cyclops and Emma Frost's romantic vacation in Paris?
Logan: This is the worst day of my life. — G. Willow Wilson
Wonder and awe have gone out of your religions. You are prepared to accept the irrational, but not the transcendent. — G. Willow Wilson
If she was pretty and well-mannered, a daughter could marry up; a son could not. A son needed his own prospects. — G. Willow Wilson
Society didn't mind if you broke the rules; it only required you to acknowledge them. — G. Willow Wilson
'Air' is very placeless - it's set in many different countries, and much of the story is about going places rather than being places. 'Air' is about travelers, and I'm a chronic traveler. — 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
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
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
It's very difficult to balance different audiences and talk to each one without selling the others short. There is no universal literature - or, if there is, I don't know how to write it. — G. Willow Wilson
Irving Karchmar, a Sufi convert and friend, and the author of the novel Master of the Jinn, said it best: at some point, the devoted pass from belief into certainty. — 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
Out-marriage is an issue religious groups have been wrestling with for some time. Of course men and women fall in love. Of course it's not always convenient to their respective cultural and spiritual norms. — G. Willow Wilson
'Habibi' is a complex and unapologetic work of fantasy - no idle undertaking for readers of any faith or no faith at all, but one well worth the trouble. — G. Willow Wilson
Controversy is what mediocre people start because they can't communicate anything meaningful. — G. Willow Wilson
The censors don't bother with fantasy books, especially old ones. They can't understand them. They think it's all kids' stuff. They'd die if they knew what The Chronicles of Narnia were really about. — G. Willow Wilson
You know those day you sometimes have? The days that seem totally ordinary when you wake up, but by the time you go to sleep that night, your whole life is divided into before that day and after that day? This is one of those days. — G. Willow Wilson
Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something. The Arabs are the only ones who've figured this out. They have the sense to call non-Arabic versions of the Criterion interpretations, not translations. — G. Willow Wilson
When you write for a comic series, many superheroes have 60 or some years of history that you are coming into. — G. Willow Wilson
I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God. — G. Willow Wilson
Oh my God, can we not talk about puberty?! I'm still not over my mom's "you're a woman now" speech. — G. Willow Wilson
When have I ever suggested you burn them? I am allowed to have opinions, aren't I? And I don't hate them - I don't give a fig about them. The only reason I cared is because you were so comfortable belittling me for believing things you only read about. I was afraid you'd turn into one of those literary types who say books can change the world when they're feeling good about themselves and it's only a book when anybody challenges them. It wasn't about the books themselves - it was about hypocrisy. You can speak casually about burning the Alf Yeom for the same reason you'd be horrified if I suggested burning The Satanic Verses - because you have reactions, not convictions. — G. Willow Wilson
In 2003, as a 21-year-old convert to Islam, I moved from Colorado to Cairo to see what life was like in a Muslim country. — G. Willow Wilson
In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art. — G. Willow Wilson
At some point, the devoted pass from belief into certainty. I did not believe in Islam; I opened my eyes every morning and saw it. — G. Willow Wilson
I don't want foreigners involved in my business. Jinn are one thing but I draw the line at Americans. — G. Willow Wilson
I do hope the success of 'Ms. Marvel' will open doors for other characters and other creators. — G. Willow Wilson
Culture belongs to the imagination; to judge it rationally is to misunderstand its function. — G. Willow Wilson
How weak your little fleshy hands are. Have you ever done anything with them but type and fondle yourself? — G. Willow Wilson
It's patently impossible for a Muslim character to represent 'all Muslims.' — G. Willow Wilson
It's a strange feeling, praying into your hands, filling the air between them with words. We think of divinity as something infinitely big, but it is also infinitely small - the condensation of your breath on your palms, the ridges in your fingertips, the warm space between your shoulder and the shoulder next to you. — G. Willow Wilson
Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction. — G. Willow Wilson
What we wanted to do was tell a story that felt relatable to anyone who's been a teenager. We haven't all been a second-generation Pakistani-American girl with superpowers, but we've all been 16 and awkward. — G. Willow Wilson
It was common, back then," said Vikram, rolling his tea glass between his palms. "Living books. Alchemists were always trying to create them. There was the Quran, which shattered language and put it back together again in a way no one had been able to replicate, using words whose meanings evolved over time without the alteration of a single dot or brushstroke. As above, so below, the alchemists reasoned-they thought they could reverse-engineer the living word using chemical compounds. If they could create a book that was literally alive, perhaps it would also produce knowledge that transcended time."
"That's pretty blasphemous," said the convert.
"Oh, very. Heretics, my dear. They made the hashisheen look orthodox. — 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
My career is a black comedy of sorts. I spent a lot of time explaining myself to various different groups. But more and more, I'm finding that the desire to communicate, which all these audiences share, is a powerful thing. — G. Willow Wilson
There is infinite space within a human life. — 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
They will wake up one morning and realize their civilization has been pulled out from under them, inch by inch, dollar by dollar, just as ours was. They will know what it is to have been asleep for the most important century of their history. — G. Willow Wilson
The 'Islam vs. the West' dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago. — G. Willow Wilson
That's silly," said Princess Farukhuaz. "A king would never risk his own life to get rid of a single evil spirit in some smelly provincial town."
"Ah," said the nurse, "but this one did. Not all kings are cruel immoral men who send others to do the work they are too frightened to carry out themselves."
"You're trying to trick me into softening my heart toward marriage," said Farukhuaz. "It won't work. But please continue."
"Very well," said the nurse — G. Willow Wilson
It will be a long while until I shall call myself well. I think perhaps too long - longer than I have left to live. But for now, I feel a great deal better than I did, and that is enough. — G. Willow Wilson
In the West, anything that must be hidden is suspect; availability and honesty are interlinked. This clashes irreconcilably with Islam, where the things that are most precious, most perfect and most holy are always hidden: the Kaaba, the faces of prophets and angels, a woman's body, Heaven. — G. Willow Wilson
They say that each word in the Quran has seven thousand layers of meaning, each of which, though some might seem contrary or simply unfathomable to us, exist equally at all times without cosmological contradiction. — G. Willow Wilson
You can't really separate modernity from history or spiritual concerns from mundane ones. Everything feeds into everything else. — G. Willow Wilson
Is not just any bint," he said. "This is a philosopher-queen, a sultana ... — 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
There's a burden of representation that comes into play when there aren't enough representatives of a certain group in popular culture. — G. Willow Wilson
Don't squeak at me, little sister," said Vikram irritably. "Let me choose my own final deed, so the angels have something impressive to write down on the last page of my book. — G. Willow Wilson
The Qur'an is God's property, not mine. — G. Willow Wilson
In the four years I've been doing this stuff for money, I've had less than forty-eight hours of downtime. Did you know that? And now I'm a ghost in the machine. By next week all the hacks and geeks and hats I call my friends will have forgotten who I am. That is the nature of this business. That is the Internet. — G. Willow Wilson
The greatest triumph of Shaytan is the illusion that you are in control. He lurks on the forking paths, lying in wait for those who become overconfident and lose their way. — G. Willow Wilson
All problems are simply interruptions in the transmission and preservation of data, he reminded himself. — G. Willow Wilson
Leaving your country at a tender age really rearranges the way you perceive the world. So I feel marginally attached to many places rather than deeply attached to any one place. — G. Willow Wilson
I think that's a huge theme in superhero books across the board: When you have this massive power, how do you use it responsibly? When do you intervene? Those are the big questions. — G. Willow Wilson
Alif found himself succumbing to the silence of the place, a quiet so open and broad that it seemed almost to roar, as though it was not silence at all but music in some ancient inaudible key. His eyes drifted shut and he slept without dreaming. — G. Willow Wilson
I've wanted to write comics ever since I figured out it was a job. — G. Willow Wilson
I'm writing in English; I'm writing for a Western audience, but the people I'm surrounded by in my daily life are mostly non-white. — G. Willow Wilson
I don't think being a writer who is religious means you have to write about nothing but religion. When I do write about religion, it's to inform the story, not to push a certain agenda. — G. Willow Wilson
We try men through one another. - Quran 6:53 — 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
In Arab Islamic society, it is traditionally taboo to criticize the lifestyle or personal philosophy of any practicing Muslim. — G. Willow Wilson
My faith did not require beauty or belonging - the deeper I went into my practice, the less it required at all. — G. Willow Wilson
How dense and literal it is. I thought it had a much more sophisticated brain."
"Your mother is dense," Alif said wearily.
"My mother was an errant crest of sea foam. But that is neither here nor there. — G. Willow Wilson
It seems like whenever you write about Muslims, people assume that you're writing about the Quran, you are writing about the Prophet Muhammad. There's no sense that Muslims are capable of individualism, that they're capable of making mistakes that are somehow not connected to Islam. — G. Willow Wilson
When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful. — G. Willow Wilson
It is only given to women to see without being seen - men must act in the open, or not at all. — G. Willow Wilson
I would have done anything for Intisar. Her love was like three kebab meals to me, with tahini and hot peppers. I never took her for granted. Never. — G. Willow Wilson
A hero is just somebody who tries to do the right thing even when it's hard.
There are more of us than you think. — G. Willow Wilson
I think comics are really part of The Zeitgeist. They reflect back to us the issues that we're concerned about in the time they are written. — G. Willow Wilson
I write about real life as it is lived by the young American Muslim women that I've had the pleasure of meeting throughout the course of my travels as a writer and being able to speak in different places and meet different people at signings and things. — G. Willow Wilson
When I am in Egypt, I am along for the ride - I am a privileged outsider, but an outsider nonetheless. — G. Willow Wilson
To live beyond the threshold of identity, to do so in the name of a peace that has not yet occurred but that is infinitely possible - this is exhilarating, necessary, and within reach. — G. Willow Wilson
You are young, so you may not understand what it feels like to be offered a second chance at my age, especially after so ... so difficult a time, when one has seen his own death and accepted it. — G. Willow Wilson
I was afraid you'd turn into one of those literary types who say books can change the world when they're feeling good about themselves and it's only a book when anybody challenges them. — G. Willow Wilson
As a writer and a mom, I wish I could split into two or three different people so I could be with my kids all day, write all day, and go out and do the interviews all day. Multiplicity woman! — G. Willow Wilson
When I need guidance or just to kvetch or to bounce ideas off of people, I go to Gail Simone, who is very much kind of the den mother of all of us who are working comics. — G. Willow Wilson
I think all these pop cultural media often reflect conversations we're having in the real world at that moment in time. I think one of the big conversations we're having as a culture is we thought we'd solved sexism and racism, and we're realizing more and more that we haven't. — G. Willow Wilson
Give the citizens of our fair seaport a real vote and they will do one of three things: vote for their own tribe, vote for the Islamists, or vote for whoever paid them the most money. — G. Willow Wilson
Revolutions are 90% social diarrhea. — G. Willow Wilson
'Butterfly Mosque' came out of the emails I wrote to family and friends back home after moving to Egypt. — G. Willow Wilson
When his computer was on and connected to the grid, he never felt as though he was alone; there were millions of people in rooms like his, reaching toward each other in the same ways he did. Now that feeling of intimacy seemed fraudulent. He lived in an invented space, easily violated. He lived in his own mind. — G. Willow Wilson
I suppose every innovation started out as a fantasy. — 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
In many countries in the Middle East - and this is changing in the wake of the Arab Spring - but for a long time, censorship of books and film was a very big deal. There were books you couldn't buy; things with political content would be censored, but there were some genres of books and film that the censors just didn't understand. — G. Willow Wilson
'Lost' seems to be the inverse of 'Air': It explores dispossession and identity by forcing a bunch of people into one invented landscape instead of using many invented landscapes to keep people apart. — G. Willow Wilson
Plastic and electricity," he said with a look of disgust. "This is how you people think you will ascend to the heaven. But if you climb too high, younger brother, the angels will ask you where you're going. — 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 'Ms. Marvel' mantle has passed to 'Kamala Khan,' a high school student from Jersey City who struggles to reconcile being an American teenager with the conservative customs of her Pakistani Muslim family. — G. Willow Wilson
Knowledge must be fixed in some way if it is to be preserved," said the sheikh. "That's why the Quran isn't meant to be altered. There were other prophets sent to other peoples, but because their books were altered, their knowledge was lost. — G. Willow Wilson
I didn't believe in spiritual homelands, and found God as readily in a strip mall as in a mosque. — G. Willow Wilson