Aging & Wisdom Quote by Rita Mae Brown

“Don’t ask to live in tranquil times” sounds like a blessing turned inside out, the kind of provocation a working writer offers when she’s tired of hearing nostalgia marketed as virtue. Rita Mae Brown isn’t romanticizing suffering so much as refusing the fantasy that art is a houseplant you can keep alive in a perfectly climate-controlled room. The line’s force comes from its blunt causality: tranquility isn’t just boring, it’s narratively sterile.

Brown’s intent is partly practical. Conflict is the engine of plot, character, and language; friction produces heat, and heat changes form. In calm eras, institutions tend to harden, norms feel “natural,” and the writer’s job becomes decorative. In turbulent eras, the mask slips. Power has to speak louder, people have to choose faster, and the stakes become legible. That’s where literature “grows”: in the exposed nerve endings of a culture.

The subtext carries Brown’s own biography. As a feminist and openly queer writer who came of age amid civil rights battles, Vietnam, and the women’s movement, she knows tranquility is often code for someone else’s comfort - usually purchased by silence. Her warning is also to readers: don’t wish away the messy present just because it’s exhausting. If you do, you may be wishing for a world where the only stories left are sanctioned ones.

There’s an implied ethics here: literature isn’t merely born from chaos; it can also push back against it. Turbulence supplies material, but the act of writing turns it into testimony, critique, and occasionally, leverage.