Creativity Quote by Terri Windling

Folklore, in Terri Windling's framing, isn't a dusty genre shelf; it's a live wire. Calling it "dialogue" rejects the museum idea of tradition as something sealed behind glass. Dialogue implies reciprocity, risk, misunderstanding, revision. You don't just inherit a story, you answer it - by retelling, reshaping, misreading, arguing back. That's an artist's claim as much as a scholar's: meaning isn't extracted from old tales, it's made in the encounter.

The phrase "centuries past" does quiet work. It stretches time to make the exchange feel improbable, almost intimate across distance. Windling is hinting at a kind of cultural time travel that doesn't require nostalgia. Folklore becomes a technology for contact: you can hear how people once metabolized fear, desire, scarcity, power. The "interesting" here is understated, a soft entry into a bigger proposition: these stories endure because they kept being useful, adaptable, and emotionally precise.

Subtextually, the line pushes back against the fetish for originality. If you're an artist, "dialogue" is permission to borrow without shame and to treat the past as collaborator rather than authority. It also nudges against gatekeeping; folklore is communal by design, and the conversation isn't limited to credentialed experts. In an era of algorithmic storytelling and franchise sameness, Windling's sentence reads like a defense of narrative biodiversity: tales that survived oral transmission can still teach us how to make art that feels human, not manufactured.