Aging & Wisdom Quote by Terri Windling

Windling’s line refuses the fashionable belief that we are uniquely doomed. It’s a corrective to doom-scrolling narcissism: the tendency to treat our era as an unprecedented collapse because the feed makes every catastrophe feel personal, immediate, and endless. By insisting “we’ve always lived in dark times,” she’s not minimizing present violence; she’s stripping it of its glamour, the perverse prestige of thinking you’re living through the worst chapter of history.

The craft of the quote is in its hinge: “sublime to the brutal.” Windling, an artist steeped in mythic storytelling, frames darkness as part of a full-spectrum human palette rather than a special-effects novelty of the 21st century. That matters because it defends stories from two opposing misuses: escapism that demands comfort, and activism that demands only pain. She’s arguing for narrative as a record of reality’s bandwidth, not a product optimized for either reassurance or outrage.

The subtext is also a subtle permission slip. If every age has its horrors, then despair isn’t the only morally serious response; making, reading, and sharing stories becomes a way to metabolize brutality without pretending it’s new or unbeatable. “It’s no less brutal now” closes the loophole that cynics exploit to accuse this view of complacency. Windling isn’t offering consolation. She’s offering scale, and with it, stamina: a long view that keeps art from becoming either propaganda or avoidance, and keeps the audience from mistaking constant exposure for unprecedented suffering.