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

“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

“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

“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