Creativity Quote by Terri Windling

There’s a polite little grenade hidden in Windling’s phrasing: “I’ve only been living in England for the last 10 years, if you don’t count my student years.” The sentence performs a familiar expatriate dance, where biography gets negotiated in real time. “Only” signals modesty, even a pre-emptive apology for claiming belonging. But the follow-up clause undercuts that modesty by quietly expanding the timeline. If you include the student years, she’s been in England longer than she’s letting on. If you don’t, she gets to present herself as relatively new, still in motion, not fully settled.

That’s the subtext: identity as an editable file. Student years are treated as a kind of liminal residency - intense, formative, yet somehow not “real life” enough to count. It’s a distinction a lot of artists and migrants recognize: the years when you were technically somewhere, but socially and emotionally still elsewhere, still becoming. By carving them out, Windling suggests that stability, not mere location, is what earns the label “living.”

The line also flatters the listener’s discretion. It invites you to decide which version of her story you want: the newcomer with fresh eyes, or the long-haul insider with deep roots. Either way, it captures a very English kind of self-positioning: understatement wrapped around a quietly complex truth about belonging, time, and the stories we tell to make our past feel coherent.