Renee Godding

“Finally one of my teachers took me aside and said: ‘Manuel, you are not God. You aren’t omnipotent. Wanting to help is good, but this belief that you, personaly, have so much power to affect the universe is starting to border on personal idolatry.’” He snorted. “He wasn’t wrong.”
“Did that help?” Selena asked.
“Not really, but at least then I felt guilty about feeling guilty, which is very catholic.”
― T. Kingfisher, Snake-Eater

“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

“In a way, I thought, our bodies are just containers. I’d always assumed that we have the capacity to absorb the world, to endlessly store everything that we come across. But as we sat there in silence, I began to question whether there were, in fact, things that could overflow from us. Is that what the Beacons were: people who had become too full?”
― An Yu, Sunbirth