32 Quotes by Fiona Wood

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.

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 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?)

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

... 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.

My heart is its own fierce country where no one else is welcome.

Mothers are generally starvers or feeders

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?

There's nothing more satisfying than being stupid with a friend.