Renee Godding

“I’d imagined that the day he lost his memory was the real moment that death came for him, but as I watched the sun disappear over the years, I began to wonder whether this erasure was, in fact, a form of death for all of us. Who are we if not just a collection of memories locked in a container made of flesh and blood? If we ceased to exist in the memory of those closest to us, then how could we assume that we were as alive as we’d been before? It made me realise that, despite what people said about it, death was not so straightforward after all.”
― An Yu, Sunbirth

“There’s no notation of ballet. It has to be passed on in real time, one living body to another. If a dancer dies without teaching the dance, the dance dies too. Of course there are films of people dancing Gisele, but for over a 100 years it had been passed between muscle and bone, and no version was present except in the moment. Dance, I thought, is presence. It is movement in the absence of past and future time.”
― Sarah Moss, Ripeness

“Grief is a running tap, a closed cabinet, chopsticks touching bowls, teeth chewing. I’d never imagined that would be the case. I hadn’t expected it to slip into everything.”
― An Yu, Sunbirth

“As people grow up, childhood becomes foggy, but no matter who you ask, they always remember the weather. They forget the locations of their schools, the names of their best friends, the colours of their houses, but never the weather. Perhaps it is the tactility of air touching skin that makes it impossible to forget. We remember it with our bones, our muscles, our skin. So even though I had been living with the cold for over half of my life, if I just closed my eyes, I could still feel the full sun blazing over Five Poems Lake.”
― An Yu, Sunbirth