Fiona Wood Quotes

She'd always been comforted by how many words there were in the English language -- more than a million. With so many words surely anything could be said, everything could be understood.
But what did the volume of words matter in any language when she couldn't even manage to ask the simplest questions? Will you tell me your story? Will you let me in to my own family? Isn't it my story, too?

REVISITING THE LIST
1. Kiss Estelle
Okay, at least I've met her. She thinks I'm a creep. And that's withought her knowing I've read her diaries. Unless we somehow fall over, exactly aligned, lip to lip, and gravity causes the pressure, or we find ourselves in a darkened room and through a series of Shakespearian ID muddles she thinks she's kissing someone else, I can't say how this is ever going to happen.

We combine our three packs of pasta for dinner – pesto. We tip the dried stuff into a pan, add water and simmer.
We try it, looking at each other with disbelief as it hits the tastebuds. 'It's pesto, Jim, but not as we know it,' I say.
'Fascinating,' says Lou, unsmiling humouring my Star Trek reference, while wincing at the foul food. (And what made me say that? Is there such a thing as a dad-joke vacuum that needs to be filled, even in the wild?)

You cow,' Estelle added. 'I heard that.' 'Give the woman the geriatric audiology medal,' Estelle said. 'I heard that, too', her mother said, from the other side of the door.

Fred is staying with his mother these holidays. She's living in London for six months, in Chelsea, studying Georgian underwear at the National Art Library. It's a thesis, not a fetish.

I'm floating. The absence of pain is powerful.

Mothers are generally starvers or feeders

How many times do your feet have to press down on a path before they make an imprint, before pieces of soul start sticking?

Van Uoc felt the stab of a sad truth: she and her mother would never be as close as her mother and grandmother had been.
Her mother got up, stretched her tidy, graceful frame and headed for the kitchen. Van Uoc wanted to be able to offer her some comfort, but what could she say? Her mother was right. The two of them represented an irreconcilable cultural split. Distance between them was inevitable.

We look at each other with shy relief. It's the look two odd socks give when they recognise each other in the wild.

Stress level: extreme. It's like she was a jar with the lid screwed on too tight, and inside the jar were pickles, angry pickles, and they were fermenting, and about to explode.

She stood behind her mother's chair and brushed her hair gently for about five minutes, drawing the brush smoothly from forehead to nape, over and over, in the way her mother liked. It was the only sustained physical contact she seemed to enjoy. Her usual mode of a kiss good-bye, for instance, was the kiss-and-push-you-on-your-way. She wasn't a snuggler. No surprise, really, that this acceptable affection came via a prickly implement.

You see it in schools all over ... the concept that 'I'll be somewhat less than my best in order to make those around me feel more comfortable' is alive and well ... I'm very keen that they understand that if they make themselves a little less than they can be, it is a one-way street to mediocrity.

Australia has got some of the best sports people in the world, but we've also got some of the best scientists and innovators too, and that needs to be celebrated more.

My mother's great line was, Grasp the nettle with two hands, girl, because if you don't somebody else will.

I've seen you reading - sometimes you open a book, and you're just ... gone. Even with your friends - it's like you disappear.

Vân Uoc decided that she too would get to know the book inside out. And something miraculous happened when they were about a quarter of the way through reading it. After weeks of ploughing and hesitating, something clicked; she stopped stumbling over the unknown words and long sentences. Words magically started to reveal meaning, most of the time anyway, through context. And the sentences themselves stopped being obstacles and started telling a story. Her eyes were racing ahead; she was comprehending the shape and rhythm of the language.

You don't do anybody any favours by being less than you are.

As usual, I don't know which way is north, but I know the direction of beauty.

... consider the meaning of these images. Every time you're working with them, ask yourself: what do they mean? And, even more important, what do they mean to me? The more specific and personal something is, the more its universality emerges.