Top 100 G. Willow Wilson Quotes
#1. Nobody as the right to give up on a whole generation before it's even had a right to prove itself.
G. Willow Wilson
#2. '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
#3. Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction.
G. Willow Wilson
#4. My synesthesia is mostly gone - it was a much bigger factor when I was a kid. But having no depth perception is a bonus when you're trying to lay out flat images and describe them to an artist - flat is all I see.
G. Willow Wilson
#5. Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.
G. Willow Wilson
#6. 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
#7. The act of concealment had become more powerful than what it concealed.
G. Willow Wilson
#8. Real tolerance means respecting other people even when they baffle you and you have no idea why they think what they think.
G. Willow Wilson
#9. I discovered I was a monotheist ... That rules out polytheism. I have also had a problem with authority, which rules out any religion with a priesthood or leader who claims to be God's representative on Earth.
G. Willow Wilson
#10. I think we're going back to the way things use to be, before a bunch of European intellectuals in tights decided to draw a line between what's rational and what's not. I don't think our ancestors thought the distinction was necessary.
(pg 370)
G. Willow Wilson
#11. 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
#12. A girl he loved had decided she did not love him
at least, not enough. How was such a problem usually addressed? Surely not with the clandestine exchange of books and computer surveillance and recourse to the jinn.
G. Willow Wilson
#13. The road to democracy is rarely smooth, but for Egyptian women, it has been exceptionally bumpy.
G. Willow Wilson
#14. The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy.
G. Willow Wilson
#17. When you write for a comic series, many superheroes have 60 or some years of history that you are coming into.
G. Willow Wilson
#18. To me, a staircase looks like a series of dark and light horizontal stripes, which is exactly how you'd draw a staircase. So I know how the image is going to look on the page.
G. Willow Wilson
#19. Muslims are ordinary members of the working public, just like you.
G. Willow Wilson
#20. I think every Muslim woman has to feel the world out for herself.
G. Willow Wilson
#21. 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
#24. 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
#26. There is a certain danger in thinking about diversity in its own little box, as something that is somehow separate from 'normal' comic books and comics creators.
G. Willow Wilson
#27. Being a Muslim in America, I've noticed that there's a ton of crossover between the Muslim community and geekdom.
G. Willow Wilson
#28. 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
#29. I think any time you have a super team, whether it's all men or all women or both, what you have are people with very unique strengths that aren't always totally compatible.
G. Willow Wilson
#30. I tend to deal with characters who are sort of at that same point of wrestling with, 'Who am I going to be as an adult? What do I believe? How am I defining myself in the context of my culture and my peer groups, my family?'
G. Willow Wilson
#31. 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
#32. I was born in New Jersey and lived there until I was about 10, so Jersey is in my roots.
G. Willow Wilson
#33. 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
#34. Ninety percent of the comic books I've written in the past had little or nothing to do with Islam.
G. Willow Wilson
#35. To me, writing an ongoing series feels like driving a freight train downhill. All you can do is steer and pray.
G. Willow Wilson
#36. For me, insomnia was something ordinary, and it came and went for ordinary reasons.
G. Willow Wilson
#37. 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
#38. 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
#40. I'm not a programmer myself, but I am a very, very picky end user of technology. I like my machines to work they way they're supposed to, all the time.
G. Willow Wilson
#42. Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.
G. Willow Wilson
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. The 'Islam vs. the West' dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago.
G. Willow Wilson
#46. My dear sir," said the sheikh. "God likes catching His servants unprepared. The boy has set down what is obviously the first plate of food he has seen in a long while in order to thank his Creator. There are few acts of piety more honest than that.
G. Willow Wilson
#47. 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
#48. Man was exiled from the Garden for eating a single fruit, and now you propose to uproot the whole tree without the angels noticing.
G. Willow Wilson
#49. The first comic I ever read was an 'X-Men' themed anti-smoking PSA they gave out in health class when I was about 10.
G. Willow Wilson
#50. If you love things or ideas or people that contradict each other, you have to be prepared to fight for every square inch of intellectual real estate you occupy.
G. Willow Wilson
#51. 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
#52. In comics, we're all weird together. I can go to a comics convention and not stand out, even though I'm the only woman in a headscarf there, because the guy next to me has a beard and a Sailor Moon costume.
G. Willow Wilson
#54. My faith did not require beauty or belonging - the deeper I went into my practice, the less it required at all.
G. Willow Wilson
#55. Birds make music, river reeds in wind make music. Babies make music. God would not forbid something that is the sharia of innocent creatures.
G. Willow Wilson
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. It is only given to women to see without being seen - men must act in the open, or not at all.
G. Willow Wilson
#60. Anything undertaken with honest intentions can be justly defended.
G. Willow Wilson
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Controversy is what mediocre people start because they can't communicate anything meaningful.
G. Willow Wilson
#69. 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
#70. To do the right thing you must sometimes defend people who don't understand you, or who fear you, or who are angry at you. There are times when you have to operate purely on faith and continue to trust human decency even when it is no longer visible.
G. Willow Wilson
#71. '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
#72. For the first time he became aware of the profound silence of the place, insulated by stone and metal from the noise of the street outside. It gave the mosque a sympathetic air, as if it could speak but chose instead to listen.
G. Willow Wilson
#73. A lot of my writer friends - some of whom are brilliant - work when the Muse calls them, for lack of a better description. You know, days of nothing, then this creative burst where they write for 36 hours straight fueled by caffeine and idealism.
G. Willow Wilson
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I think lot of Muslims have gotten fatigued by the way Muslim characters, even 'positive' ones, are portrayed in the media.
G. Willow Wilson
#77. '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
#78. 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
#79. Wonder and awe have gone out of your religions. You are prepared to accept the irrational, but not the transcendent.
G. Willow Wilson
#80. You lent me The Golden Compass! It's full of jinni trickery, and you were angry at me when I told you that made it dangerous! Why do you get mad when religion tells you that the things you want to be true are true?
When it's true, it's not fun anymore. All right? When it's true it's scary.
G. Willow Wilson
#81. Destiny and choice are the same thing. You chose to be here, so it couldn't have happened any other way.
G. Willow Wilson
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. I don't want foreigners involved in my business. Jinn are one thing but I draw the line at Americans.
G. Willow Wilson
#85. 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
#86. She did not know that a copy of her incomplete thesis sat behind one of his firewalls, ensuring her words would survive any event short of the apocalypse. These were the only gestures that made sense to him. So much of what he felt did not translate.
G. Willow Wilson
#87. Thematically, in a lot of what I write, there's a sense of displacement, of being rooted in multiple places, and how that can tug at your identities and your wants and your goals.
G. Willow Wilson
#89. 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
#90. When I am in Egypt, I am along for the ride - I am a privileged outsider, but an outsider nonetheless.
G. Willow Wilson
#91. Sometimes, by using the most over-the-top, ridiculous plot device you can imagine, you get some interesting little conflicts and cool things that you might not otherwise have a chance to explore.
G. Willow Wilson
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Metaphors are dangerous. Calling something by a false name changes it, and metaphor is just a fancy way of calling something by a false name.
G. Willow Wilson
#96. 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
#97. Society didn't mind if you broke the rules; it only required you to acknowledge them.
G. Willow Wilson
#98. The Qur'an is in many ways far less concrete than the Bible, relying on the esoteric more often than the apparent.
G. Willow Wilson
#99. You can't really separate modernity from history or spiritual concerns from mundane ones. Everything feeds into everything else.
G. Willow Wilson
#100. 'Butterfly Mosque' came out of the emails I wrote to family and friends back home after moving to Egypt.
G. Willow Wilson
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