Fiona Wood Quotes

Mothers are generally starvers or feeders

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.

I don't think I fully appreciated how relaxing it is having someone I can be really mean to. It's going to be so hard being nice all the time.

REVISITING THE LIST1. Kiss EstelleOkay, 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.

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

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?)

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.

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 under