Aging & Wisdom Quote by Terri Windling

What makes Windling's line land is how casually it admits to being conquered. "No particular interest" is a deliberately flat setup, the kind of shrug you give when you think a place is someone else's obsession: a travel-poster region, a genre setting, a mood. Then comes the pivot: "completely surprised" and, more importantly, "stole my heart". She doesn't say she chose the desert. She frames it as an act committed against her indifference, a quiet ambush.

As an artist, Windling is also smuggling in a theory of influence. The Southwest here isn't just scenery; it's an aesthetic force that overrides your prior taste. Desert landscapes are famously "empty" in the tourist imagination, but her language insists on the opposite: the desert is active, almost predatory, capable of intimacy. That theft metaphor turns a harsh environment into a seducer, which hints at the deeper appeal of the Southwest in American culture: it offers both starkness and myth, a place where minimalism and enchantment can coexist.

The subtext is a creative origin story told without self-mythologizing. She marks "as a young girl" to underline how early assumptions harden into identity, then shows that identity can be rewritten by geography. The heart-stealing isn't just romantic; it's vocational. A place "steals" your attention, your palette, your subjects, your sense of what feels true. In one sentence, she captures how artists are often made less by intention than by the landscapes that refuse to let them go.