Charlotte Wood Quotes & Sayings

What would people in their old lives be saying about these girls? Would they be called missing? Would some documentary program on the ABC that nobody watched, or one of those thin newspapers nobody read, somehow connect their cases, find the thread to make them a story? The Lost Girls, they could be called. Would it be said, they 'disappeared', 'were lost'? Would it be said that 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. They lured abduction and abandonment to themselves, they marshalled themselves into this prison where they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them. — Charlotte Wood

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. — 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. — Charlotte Wood

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. — Charlotte Wood

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