Top 70 G. Willow Wilson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Good is not a thing you are. It’s a thing you do.”

— G. Willow Wilson

2. “All translations are made up,” opined Vikram, “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

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

— G. Willow Wilson

4. “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

5. “We are faith. We speak all languages of beauty and hardship.”

— G. Willow Wilson

6. “Sometimes you need to see a place through new eyes in order to understand what you’ve missed.”

— G. Willow Wilson

7. “That’s half of heroing. Noticing things.”

— G. Willow Wilson

8. “But being someone else isn’t liberating. It’s exhausting.”

— G. Willow Wilson

9. “There’s this ayah from the Quran that my dad always quotes when he sees something bad on TV. A fire or a flood or a bombing. “Whoever kills one person, it is as if he has killed all of mankind... And whoever saves one person, it is as if he has saved all of mankind.” When I was a little kid, that always made me feel better. Because no matter how bad things get there are always people who rush in to help. And according to my dad they are blessed.”

— G. Willow Wilson

10. “Though you have struggled, wandered, traveled far, It is yourselves you see, and what you.”

— G. Willow Wilson

11. “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

12. “Nobody as the right to give up on a whole generation before it’s even had a right to prove itself.”

— G. Willow Wilson

13. “Civilization was, Fatima realized, something very simple; it was the right of these small rituals to perpetuate themselves in peace.”

— G. Willow Wilson

14. “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

15. “Yes, you were taught to waste your anger. It’s convenient for girls to be angry about nothing. Girls who are angry about something are dangerous. If you want to live, you must learn to use your anger for your own benefit, not the benefit of those who would turn it against you. – Vikram.”

— G. Willow Wilson

16. “Fear can make anything real,” said Vikram. “The black-cloaks are afraid you’re a sorcerer. If they condemn you as a sorcerer and burn you for it, then you are, for all practical purposes, a sorcerer, whether you began as one or not. Fear doesn’t need to make sense in order to have consequences.”

— G. Willow Wilson

17. “These are not the banu adam you’re looking for.”

— G. Willow Wilson

18. “Nothing is so frightening or evil that it doesn’t come from the same thing that made the stars.”

— G. Willow Wilson

19. “Culture belongs to the imagination; to judge it rationally is to misunderstand its function.”

— G. Willow Wilson

20. “I don’t want foreigners involved in my business. Jinn are one thing but I draw the line at Americans.”

— G. Willow Wilson

21. “For God also tells us that when you perform an action you believe to be a sin, it still counts as a sin even if it is proven to be permissible. Conscience. Conscience is the ultimate measure of man.”

— G. Willow Wilson

22. “There’s always that one group of people who think they have special permission to terrorize anybody who disagrees with them. And then everybody who looks like them suffers.”

— G. Willow Wilson

23. “We have reached a state of constant reinvention. Revolutions have moved off the battlefield and on to home computers. Nothing shocks one anymore. We are living in a post-fictional era. Fictional governments are accepted without comment, and we can sit in a mosque and have a debate about the fictional pork a fictional character consumes in a video game, with every gravity we would accord something quite real.”

— G. Willow Wilson

24. “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

25. “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

26. “Society didn’t mind if you broke the rules; it only required you to acknowledge them.”

— G. Willow Wilson

27. “The act of concealment had become more powerful than what it concealed.”

— G. Willow Wilson

28. “Destiny and choice are the same thing. You chose to be here, so it couldn’t have happened any other way.”

— G. Willow Wilson

29. “Some ideas are so beautiful that even evil people believe in them.”

— G. Willow Wilson

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

— G. Willow Wilson

31. “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

32. “But you can’t go through a pilgrimage and not come out changed.”

— G. Willow Wilson

33. “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

34. “Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction.”

— G. Willow Wilson

35. “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

36. “I suppose every innovation started out as a fantasy.”

— G. Willow Wilson

37. “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

38. “Where are the princes with their legendary swords and white steeds, who love where they ought and fight what they ought? Why is it only us, all muddled up?”

— G. Willow Wilson

39. “Even if you can only do the littlest bit of good, you have to keep going, because that little bit of good may save someone’s life.”

— G. Willow Wilson

40. “How weak your little fleshy hands are. Have you ever done anything with them but type and fondle yourself?”

— G. Willow Wilson

41. “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

42. “They had no idea what it was like to live in a place that boasted one of the most sophisticated digital policing systems in the world, but no proper mail service. Emirates with princes in silver-plated cars and districts with no running water. An Internet where every blog, every chat room, every forum is monitored for illegal expressions of distress and discontent.”

— G. Willow Wilson

43. “He was impotent, here as in the outside world, his utility confined to punching commands into computers. Beyond the bedroom where he sat day after day like an idle spider in the midst of a digital Web he was boneless, protected only by a black carapace of T-shirts and jeans, unprepared for physical danger. His mind struggled against the limits of his body.”

— G. Willow Wilson

44. “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

45. “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

46. “Superstition is thriving. Pedantry is thriving. Sectarianism is thriving. Belief is dying out. To most of your people the jinn are paranoid fantasies who run around causing epilepsy and mental illness. Find me someone to whom the hidden folk are simply real, as described in the Books. You’ll be searching a long time. Wonder and awe have gone out of your religions. You are prepared to accept the irrational, but not the transcendent. And that, cousin, is why I can’t help you.”

— G. Willow Wilson

47. “Through the bile and ignorance of the radical imams and self-righteous apostates, through the spin of the news networks and the pomposity of academics, I saw a straight, unwavering line. How could I be disappointed? I did not believe in Islam; I opened my eyes every morning and saw it.”

— G. Willow Wilson

48. “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

49. “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

50. “Revolutions are 90% social diarrhea.”

— G. Willow Wilson