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

“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

“They are not here, her children. Not anymore. She finds them elsewhere sometimes. In the first smiles of her baby son, and the way his hair curls after a bath. They are in the high teenage voices of other children; girls the age her daughter would be now, with their gossamer clothing and their eyes lined in black uncertain rings. Her son, she finds sometimes in the gangs passing home from the primary school at the end of the road. The shove and snigger of them. The new unchildlike smell. And sometimes she sees them in her own face as she stares into the mirror after a night of broken milk-downed sleep, and counts the new lines around her eyes.
And she supposes, they are with Tom too. And she hopes that this is a solace and not a haunting.”
― Claire Gleeson, Show Me Where It Hurts

“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