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G. Willow Wilson

G. Willow Wilson Biography

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“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”

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Book:The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam
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“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.”

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Book:Alif the Unseen
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“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.”

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Author:G. Willow Wilson
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“You have such an odd relationship to your environment," mused the man. "Such a paranoid relationship. You seem intent on existing in smaller and smaller spaces, filled with more and more gadgets, with the mistaken impression that this will give you more control over your lives. There's something a little impious about it." "Nothing wrong with gadgets," muttered Alif. "No, except that they're not magic," said the man, "and a lot of you seem to believe they should be.”

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Book:Alif the Unseen
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“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.”

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Book:Generation Why
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“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.”

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Author:G. Willow Wilson
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