Bodies of Light Quotes

“I was always looking ahead to a time when I would miss this.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“The Sydney of this time was a different place to the honeymoon city I'd visited with Damien. That one was the crescent of the bridge, the rolling waves beneath the ferry, the shaded streets in The Rocks where we'd bought touristy postcards to send home. Everywhere was so lush, everything blue and green. This Sydney was more or less the space between Campsie and Dulwich Hill. Suburban streets, 7-Eleven hot chocolate, stream, car fumes, perc in my nose and throat, light dancing across the scratched Perspex of train window.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“For years I only wanted something to put my back up against, but now I am trying to be my own spine. I used to think I could outrun time but now I am just trying to live through it.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“I can barely remember our conversation, only the rapture and grief that sank me when I understood it fully: that there was someone who knew I existed, that someone had looked for me and found me.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“But we never really understood each other, and that was my fault. I felt like there was so much I couldn’t tell her because of how it might make me look. I always thought there was something wrong with me, and I just wanted her to see the good bits, so I just didn’t talk about it.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“I still don’t consider myself a religious person. If Jesus ever existed, I don’t think he literally took a deep breath and rolled away the stone. But the Reverend often speaks about the resurrection as a metaphor. Which is, I think, one way of understanding it. At the very least it aligns with my experience of what is possible: finding yourself in a place that feels like death, and somehow swimming up out of it.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“I tried to bargain with these souvenirs. I would greet them when I was alone. It doesn’t work that way, of course. Not remembering is not the same thing as forgetting.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“It was as though the more I felt like a real person with a secure life and places to exist, the more of an asshole I became. I’d filled my brain with the details of the musculoskeletal system and pharmaceutical contraindications, and driven out any kindness or patience that had been there before.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“Doesn’t it feel kind of a selfish way to live? Jeff asked. Selfish, I echoed. Like, we’re just living for ourselves. I don’t know. Am I wrong? I think it’s selfish to have a child out of a desire to reproduce your own image. Or because it’s the thing to do, and you sign right up without realising what it means.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“I also think that most people would do the selfish thing if it meant surviving.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“I meant, people aren’t entitled to one another. We’re supposed to have margins. Otherwise all relationships would just be people melting into each other.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“I was not yet twenty-five, and had spent half my life in rooms I hadn’t chosen and couldn’t leave.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“I thought about seeing a shrink, but I knew we’d end up circling my childhood like water in a plughole, and it was not a story I was interested in anymore.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“At certain times in my life, when bad things happened—after the first time Terrence held me down in my bed, after Judith had the stroke, after I got my records and had a nervy—they seemed like an inevitability more than a shock. In some ways, it was almost a relief: not that Angus was gone, but that the worst thing had happened. I didn’t have to wait for it anymore.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“There were classes on how to breathe through labour, diagrams on swaddling correctly. But no information about what happened if you didn’t love your baby. No pamphlets on who to call if you suspected there was something fundamentally missing, some bundle of neurons that had been degraded, which impaired your ability to care for a tiny person.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“I try to hide my teeth when I can. They give away that no one ever looked after me properly as a kid, and that I’ve never really looked after myself. But this photo was different. It was a version of me that I didn’t recognise. Someone full of joy.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“When I see teenage girls now, rashed with pimples and making themselves as small as possible, I feel such tenderness for them. I try to be kind to myself when I think about that time. I can’t have been as grotesque as I remember. But all I recall is pure, blinding hatred. I showered with my back to my reflection.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

“Kids think they want to see their parents, but the leaving, the tearing-away, makes it worse than not having seen them at all. Or they turn up at the playground to see mum and she’s too stoned to walk properly. Or dad makes a threat to the welfare, who calls off the visit.”
― Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light