Quotes from Charlotte Wood

Neither Boncer nor Teddy comes out of the house, not even to watch from the veranda. Here, laying the dead to rest, like washing and feeding and birth, is women's work.

To create is to defy emptiness. It is generous, it affirms. To make is to add to the world, not subtract from it.

She had once told him that as soon as you placed your hands upon a stranger, they begin to talk. Everybody found it so, she said: hairdressers, nurses, nuns. It was dangerously easy to give in: human defences dissovled at another person's touch.

Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves.

And how could this be? The 30's were the age you fell most dangerously in love, Adele had discovered, after the fact. Not with a man or a woman, but with your friends.

The point of an animal was not for it to love you; it was that you could love it. In all it's otherness, your unbelonging to its kind, it could yet receive-boundlessly-your love.

Neither Boncer nor Teddy comes out of the house, not even to watch from the veranda. Here, laying the dead to rest, like washing and feeding and birth, is women's work.

People thought that when you got old, you wanted your lost youth, or lost love, or men, or sex. But really you wanted work and you wanted money.

The unknown is always a threat. Unruly artists take to all this eagerly; they find a home in outsiderness. But while history has always made a certain space available to feral men, from Caravaggio to Picasso to Prince, feral women have a harder time of it. Much of our battle is internal. Raised from birth to please, to be helpful, to shrink and be decorative, for a woman to proudly show herself in all her individuality is a much greater challenge.

No, it wasn't lovers but friends - these courageous, shining people - you pursued, romanced with dinners and gifts and weekends away.

She returned to her mantra: something would happen, something would turn up, it always had before, it would again.

All this counting and measuring of nanoparticles, each one thirty-billionths of a metre. She had been trying to measure how much of herself she had lost, had been waiting for the possibility of splendour, waiting to understand why she had given herself, so completely, away. She would not wait anymore. She