Cloudwish Quotes

“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!”
― Fiona Wood, Cloudwish

“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.”
― Fiona Wood, Cloudwish

“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.”
― Fiona Wood, Cloudwish

“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.”
― Fiona Wood, Cloudwish

“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?”
― Fiona Wood, Cloudwish

“Who had decided that some should have so little and others so much?”
― Fiona Wood, Cloudwish

“What would the limitations on her new-found charm be? Was there an expiry date? She couldn't even revisit how the hell was this happening? It was too much to get her head around. It did not bear scrutiny.”
― Fiona Wood, Cloudwish

“How disconcerting it was to have an idle fantasy turn into real life attraction.”
― Fiona Wood, Cloudwish

“What would Jane do?”
― Fiona Wood, Cloudwish

“If you survived then you were all right; no - lucky. What problems? You're alive! She wanted more than survival. She wanted beauty; she wanted love; she wanted abundance.”
― Fiona Wood, Cloudwish

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

“... 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.”
― Fiona Wood, Cloudwish