Quotes from Fiona Wood

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

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.

Sport...teaches life's lessons. But there's no substitute, in my book, for education, because that gives you choice.

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.

My problems are like waves - just as one disappears with a snarl and a hiss there's another shaping up to knock me down.

Something large and happy has unfolded in my chest, erupting in a smile that won't quit. I can't remember ever feeling so light-hearted. Or is my heart full? Or bursting? Not aching, that's for sure.

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!

There's this sky I know

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.

Guys, please, one life-changing shock at a time, I felt like saying.

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.

It's the look two odd socks give when they recognise each other in the wild.

Mothers are generally starvers or feeders

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

Almost the entire world relies on other people's opinions to tell them what to think.

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