The collection / 13 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

SearchTypeTopicEraCulture / collection labelCountry attributionTraditionOrder

Author

Leave empty for every voice. Browse all authors ↗

Reset

Culture labels and country attributions follow the source collections; earliest origins may be unknown.

13 results · Page 1 of 1Play this collection ▷

01Undated

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

Fiona Wood / quote

↗

02Undated

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

Fiona Wood / quote

↗

03Undated

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

Fiona Wood / quote

↗

04Undated

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 / quote

↗

05Undated

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 under

Fiona Wood / quote

↗

06Undated

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 / quote

↗

07Undated

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?)

Fiona Wood / quote

↗

08Undated

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 / quote

↗

09Undated

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.

Fiona Wood / quote

↗

10Undated

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.

Fiona Wood / quote

↗

11Undated

... 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 / quote

↗

12Undated

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.

Fiona Wood / quote

↗

13Undated

Mothers are generally starvers or feeders

Fiona Wood / quote

↗