32 Quotes by Fiona Wood

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.

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.

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

It makes me feel tired about how guarded we are the whole time. Without even trying we're ready to make a joke of everything, serving up the day with big dollops of irony and derision and cynicism. As if. Sucked in. Kidding.

... 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.

Never listen to fools who dis Jane Eyre as being a story about a girl who gets her mean man. This is a character who gets what she wants and lives on her own terms by having moral fortitude, intelligence, courage, imagination and a will of iron. And that is one hell of a checklist. Imagine Charlotte Brontë writing this book in 1847. What a powerful story for women living at that time!

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.

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