Glenn Haybittle Quotes & Sayings

Up ahead are a forest of searchlights. A thicket of long thin smoking beams pivoting back and forth. Stabbing at the darkness. Making of the sky a kind of dome as though V Victor is about to enter some supernatural cathedral of light. — Glenn Haybittle

When he thinks of his wife now it is like walking barefoot down steps to the sea at night. A secretive act. A moment of wonder he treats with caution as though shielding a buffeted flame. — Glenn Haybittle

If you're not going to feel how are you going to know what to think? Isn't it in the nature of feeling to evolve thought? — Glenn Haybittle

Isabella pauses as something in her body holds itself erect, then arches towards the voice of Oskar's little girl, like a flower tilting under the weight of its hoard of pollen. — Glenn Haybittle

The panic attacks have been a part of Zinnia's life for almost six months. They allow no pathway back to the innocent complacency with which she once made sense of the world around her. With every new attack more of her identity crumbles. Every day the panic rubs something else out that has been achieved with application, sometimes with inspiration. — Glenn Haybittle

The snow, the effect of concealment and secrecy it creates, makes him think of the brutality of the wartime legislation to forbid and violently extract secrets. It is as if the hushed white landscape is showing how sacrosanct are our secrets, how much of our vitality is bound up in them. — Glenn Haybittle

Hugh is now playing a game on his mobile phone. His greasy fat fingers with bitten down nails surprisingly agile on the keys. The concentration on his face is admirable in a way. It was probably with a similar level of concentration that the theory of relativity was formulated. — Glenn Haybittle

Outside the station of Santa Maria Novella Isabella has to stand aside while a line of prisoners are marched into the terminus by armed Fascist guards. They pass within touching distance of her, carrying bags and bundles. There are old people and some children too. They all seem swamped by their clothes, disembodied by them somehow. Then she catches the eye of Ezra, a young Jewish man who once worked in the arts material shop where she buys most of her pigments and brushes. He is almost at the back of the line. The veins are high and urgent on his hand. His trousers are held up with a dirty piece of string. His cobalt blue eyes hold hers for the barest beat of a moment but some essence of his being conveys itself to her and her blood quickens in sympathy for him. She has the feeling of looking into the eyes of a ghost. — Glenn Haybittle

Never leave home without your memories. — Glenn Haybittle

Did you know the English wouldn't dream of putting olive oil on food? They use it for ear infections. Freddie told me."
"Yes, I've heard their cuisine hasn't evolved since the Middle Ages. — Glenn Haybittle

She is like the rain that loosens the scent from things. — Glenn Haybittle

Often of late she has accused herself of being a hard woman. As if she will not suffer her soil to be raw and tender, will not submit to the vulnerability of the new green shoot. — Glenn Haybittle

The sight of Florence below, the cluster of churches and towers and palaces tiered up on either side of the river, is as familiar as his own hand, as surreal as any nightmare. The setting of many of the most intimate and heartening moments of his life. Taunting him now with a spell of inaccessibility. Since the advent of war many things have happened to him that he could not possibly have imagined. He wonders if this is one of the subliminal reasons men wage war. To increase the daily frequency of surprise and shock. The forerunners of revelation. — Glenn Haybittle

They always told each other about the parts of the day they had spent apart, sketching in detail so the other could see it, so it became a memory they seemed to share in common. They were good at talking. Sharing stories. Everything he did only seemed to take root when he told her about it. There were times when he arrived home as breathless as an inspired poet with the urgency to talk to her. — Glenn Haybittle

Felix has always believed that if there is one thing in life that is fated it is our birth, that far-fetched conspiracy of circumstances which have to occur in order for us to get born. — Glenn Haybittle

It is Davy's job to decipher and transmit information into code. Sexual language is like that, Freddie thinks. Everything coded. Everything stripped down to elementary dots and dashes. — Glenn Haybittle

The painting you saw in your mind was beautiful when it was your secret. Once it's on the canvas it's as if someone else has got hold of your secret and sullied it, distorted it. — Glenn Haybittle

The less bravely we live the more stifling becomes our fear of death. — Glenn Haybittle

I'm an artist," she says. It always costs her an effort to make this statement. As if she is handing over a false identity card. — Glenn Haybittle

Outside, he stretches up his arms beneath the brightening sky. His breath and heartbeat like a gift newly restored to him. — Glenn Haybittle

When he turns inland he sees two moving white columns in the sky. At first glance he thinks they are emissions of smoke. The two encroaching formations ripple into funnels and then spread out beneath the labyrinthine coral of clouds into fans. His vision blurs for a moment. Then he realises he is witnessing two perfectly synchronised flocks of birds. The abstract shapes they form are flawless. He stands with his hands in his pockets as the birds taper into a long undulating line, which gently vanishes behind the surface of things. The same thing has happened to his father. He has vanished behind the surface of things. — Glenn Haybittle

Superstition in wartime takes a more powerful hold on the mind. One sees omens in everything. One is returned to a more primitive view of the world and its sign language. — Glenn Haybittle

He knows if he kills this man he will see his face every night before he goes to sleep. That his face will become more vivid to him than his own face. If he kills the man he will be forced to wear this man's face for the rest of his life. — Glenn Haybittle

Tonight Oskar and his daughter are going to sleep in an abandoned wooden boat on the beach. He will try to make this seem normal. Every day he has to try to make what happens to them appear nothing out of the ordinary. As if he still has all the magician's tricks of a father. As if he still has the power to keep her from harm. — Glenn Haybittle

The choir and congregation are singing I Vow to Thee My Country. Never has he heard the hymn sung with such heartfelt pathos. It is as if everyone is trying to sing themselves into being. It is the war that makes everyone sing out their hearts like this. The hymn expresses some imperative deep down in the blood. Like running fingers over the edge of things in pitch darkness. — Glenn Haybittle

Perhaps it is both the tragedy of life and the blessing of life that most moments only happen once. — Glenn Haybittle

Esme skips on ahead. Jumping from one foot to the other, as if she can see markings on the ground he can't. She is constantly jumping and skipping and twirling with the lightness of falling snow, looking up at him bright with questions, tugging on his hand, dashing off with all the speed her body is capable of and then skipping on the spot up ahead as if consecrating it for his arrival. It is so easy to make her happy that it seems like cheating at times. — Glenn Haybittle

Landscapes of fields and small clusters of buildings hurtle past outside like fragments of songs never sung in their entirety. — Glenn Haybittle

It's in our dreams that we pull people towards us. — Glenn Haybittle

Power needs plots because plots are secret until they unfold and the most gratifying kind of power is holding onto an explosive secret. — Glenn Haybittle

You know when you're on a train at a station and there's another train opposite and the other train starts moving and there's that utterly convincing illusion that it's your train that is moving and you feel a bit disorientated when you realise you're still standing still. That's what my life has been like since Freddie left. — Glenn Haybittle

When a woman tilts her head to fasten an earring she so often becomes for the moment a quintessence of herself, he thinks. She becomes a thrilling foreign language. — Glenn Haybittle

Every night I build a fire for you, Alowa. Every night I dance on the rooftop for you. Look at the flames, Alowa. Aren't they beautiful? Look at the smoke. I'm dancing in the smoke, Alowa. — Glenn Haybittle

He follows a man with a rolled up mattress strapped to his back. When he stepped down from the train into the brutalising glare of the searchlights in the marshalling yard he noticed two SS soldiers pointing at this man and laughing. — Glenn Haybittle

She realises how little she knows about this man. Her knowledge little more than a thin sheen of brightness, like reflected sunlight on an opaque pond. — Glenn Haybittle

I'm always left with such a barren idea of myself if I let an opportunity pass. I get home and I feel like yesterday's dirty plates, smeared in dried sauce and grease. I have this idea that it's the women we don't sleep with who haunt us. They become like a missing page in our book. The part of the story we'll never know. — Glenn Haybittle

She remembers in 1940 when the city's population had been called upon to donate all the metal objects they could spare. Married women were asked for their wedding rings. Florence's piazzas were thus heaped with enormous piles of tarnished rusting metal objects. There was something almost touching about the slapdash poverty of the contribution. Candelabras, door handles, pipes, bits of engines, tools. It later occurred to her that these bits of waste metal would in all probability be melted down and fashioned into weapons, ammunition maybe. That the candelabra she was looking at might end up lodged in someone's chest in the form of a bullet, someone who would never know that a household ornament of mysterious provenance would cause his death. — Glenn Haybittle

And who isn't less innocent than they lead us to believe? That's one of the fundamental truths about human nature. — Glenn Haybittle

Italian as a language, she thinks, suits children with its singsong cadences and rising lingering inflections, its quick swinging gait and easy adaptability to argument, to passionate outbursts. — Glenn Haybittle

He remembers an afternoon not long after his wife's arrest when he caught himself avoiding puddles of rainwater on the streets. When he realised what he was doing it struck him as ridiculous and even reprehensible that he was still prey to such petty concerns. He began deliberately splashing through all the biggest puddles, as if to show some higher power how little he cared about anything anymore. His daughter copied him. Skipping and dancing as if she and the rain shared a secret complicity. — Glenn Haybittle

Sharp lines draw too much attention to themselves, like vanity. And what's vanity but a series of sharp lines which have yet to be softened? — Glenn Haybittle

A searchlight catches the plane for an instant. The cockpit is awash with searing bluish brightness. As if a revelation is about to take place. As if an angel is about to appear. He can't see the instrument panel. The finger of light has the aircraft in its grip. Holding her suspended above the city. As if she is perched on a tightrope. Visible to the whole of Berlin down below. The glare bites into his eyes, sucks strength from his legs. He kicks the rudders to the right. The starboard wing tilts down. He pulls the wheel back. Below, a shifting tableau of coloured globes slide over the tilting smoking surface of the earth. Some roads and buildings made visible by fires and incendiaries. — Glenn Haybittle

The sky is a virginal blue translucence as though bereft for a fleeting moment of the effects of both light and darkness. A crimson streak smoulders over the outline of the hills, a simmering bloodline. There is a solitary canoe on the water. A cold white sheen rises from the water. She holds her breath. As if to stop any more time from passing, to stop the future happening. The peacefulness of the morning is almost heartbreaking in its fragility. — Glenn Haybittle

To tell a lie is to risk being caught out and there's excitement in avoiding traps: it was an aspect of my childhood I was perhaps averse to relinquishing. — Glenn Haybittle

Freddie is now officially the enemy. His unauthorised presence in the city a tightrope along which he has to walk back and forth every day. The streets bristle with black shirted men carrying guns who believe themselves taller than they are. Everything he carries within himself becomes secret, something that gives off illegal light and heat inside him. Sometimes he feels like a shadow that glows with this light, this heat. — Glenn Haybittle

The cabinets and shelves are a bright busy choreography of oils, shampoos, conditioners, scrubs, lotions, salts, unguents. Zinnia loves buying pots and bottles and tubes of alchemised essences that smell like yearning or intimacy on the skin. — Glenn Haybittle

The death beams slide around the sky like dancers on ice. As if exchanging partners in this vaulted ballroom of coloured smoke. He imagines a Strauss waltz accompanying the dance of the Nazi searchlights. — Glenn Haybittle

Oskar pushes away the blanket. Lies looking down at his naked body. His naked body that will give the lie to any false identity papers he manages to procure. Has anyone, he wonders, ever explained to me the significance of circumcision? Why I have had to sacrifice to God a piece of my sexual organ. — Glenn Haybittle

There are olive trees outside and the imagined smell of their bark and silvered leaves brings with it the first unfurling of some new imperative she feels coiled up within her. Her whole body with a joyful shout know it is back in Italy. — Glenn Haybittle

It's our memories that teach us who we are. — Glenn Haybittle

There they are. Dancing in a circle. Shadows swinging over the snow. Calling upon the ancestors. Each wearing the sacred shirt. Side stepping to the left in time to the echoing heartbeat of the drums and the echoing yearning of the songs. There they are. Dancing in a circle. Shadows swinging over the firelit snow. Calling upon the ancestors. Expecting something wonderful to happen. Everyone singing. We will live again. We will live again. — Glenn Haybittle

Nothing quite prepares you for the sight of your dead father. Nothing is more unbelievable than the sight of death on such a familiar face. — Glenn Haybittle

Over imagine something beforehand and you take the pulse out of it when it happens. — Glenn Haybittle

Today she feels she is the master of her craft. Today she is free of the grinding tyranny of doubt. The voice that mocks her ambition. The voice that bites and slanders and causes her more heartache than any other voice. Today she is focused, she is exultant. Her every brushstroke like a wake of radiance. Today she can move the paint around the canvas at will. If only painting were like this every day. Without the sudden extinguishing of light, the collapsing of belief, the cursing and flailing, the knots and clenched fists in a world gone suddenly dark. — Glenn Haybittle

Italy, like areas of her childhood, is a part of her world she has always kept secret from her husband. These are places she goes to renew her virginity. — Glenn Haybittle

She remembers once handing her father a flower she picked and how in the act of giving she experienced herself as that flower - the sticky stalk resin, the hard green shoots, the sheltered stamens and raw red anthers. She needed him to understand her no less than she needed to remain a mystery. — Glenn Haybittle

The temptation to betray a secret, always breathing its hot breath in your ear. — Glenn Haybittle

They stood by the open window of their hotel room with the rain sweeping into their faces. A bolt of lightning lit up the Grand Canal. Struck it out of the darkness in a searing eloquent flash. The expectation was that the night to come would be no less bracing, no less eloquent. — Glenn Haybittle

Strange, she thinks, how vulnerable the back of your neck feels when you listen to silence. — Glenn Haybittle

Florence exists to educate our memory. — Glenn Haybittle

She is accustomed to studying faces. Usually what she seeks in them is inspiration. Today she looks for signs of malice and treachery. — Glenn Haybittle

Look how beautiful the flames are, Alowa. Look how beautiful my naked body is, Alowa. Are you looking at my naked body? I'm dancing towards you. — Glenn Haybittle

She inhales the peppery warm breath of the cypresses. She loves their scent. It's a scent that seems to make moments memories even before they've stopped happening. — Glenn Haybittle

Agreements have to be made in the dark for them to be binding. — Glenn Haybittle

At that moment the ghost dance seems to Zinnia like the relationship of two people who never quite consummate the love they feel for each other. — Glenn Haybittle

On a piece of wasteland in Leeds I once saw a used condom in the grass. A dead and sordid thing. And yet to my thirteen-year-old mind the whole mystery of life seemed to stream through it. Nothing I've seen since has been so eloquent of the thrilling and terrifying mysteries of life. — Glenn Haybittle

The radar directed flak intensifies. Like swarms of angry red-and-yellow-eyed snakes slithering up invisible ropes in the sky. The sky around them is a glittering maelstrom of light. The stars pale into insignificance. Down below the city is lit up in sections as shockwaves fan out in kaleidoscopic bursts. Shell smoke rising up from the ground. On his right a burst of flame and a thick guttering of black smoke lit up by the geometry of the searchlights. — Glenn Haybittle

He likes to think of himself as someone who can give quick clever answers to awkward questions. It is an important part of his self-esteem. — Glenn Haybittle

When the bomb doors are open and you're flying straight and steady over battery upon battery of radar guided guns with ten thousand pounds of explosives and two thousand gallons of high octane petrol exposed under your seat it feels like you're dangling a piece of raw red meat to a great white shark. That's how he once described the bomb run in a letter to his father. — Glenn Haybittle

Artists, like criminals, are dependent on a jury. — Glenn Haybittle

That there's a deep compulsion in the human spirit to overcome the selfish antics of the I in us. War, grindingly, shifts one's perspective from I to we. Never again will many of us feel our lives so interpedently entwined as we do in these times of war. Never again will someone else's loss or gain become such an integral part of our own store of resources. — Glenn Haybittle

The old bells of the church of San Frediano toll with bold resounding strokes. In their wake broadening rings of silence seem to echo up over the rooftops. The setting sun rakes incandescent highlights over the water. A group of waterfowl on an island of grass half way across the river appear made of silver light. — Glenn Haybittle

The ripped open houses with their exposed arrangements, their laid bare secrets, are like portraits. Each one has its own individual facial expression. More identity is on display in the midst of the destruction. More intimacy. It makes her realise how vulnerable these achievements are. Identity. Intimacy. — Glenn Haybittle

The moon seems to shine back at her the increased need of intimacy, of secrecy and seclusion the war has made everyone feel. — Glenn Haybittle

She turns to look down at the tiered vineyards and, beyond, the vignette of Florence in the valley as if scooped up on a spoon. Its domes and spires and rooftops appearing to float on a tide of unearthly mist as inviolate and inaccessible as a private longing. — Glenn Haybittle

When darkness settles over the city two prongs of light suddenly reach high up into the night sky. The searchlights remain fixed, two bright smoking fingers lighting up the underside of clouds and providing a canopy of light over the city. She feels enchantment forging a ring around the moment. — Glenn Haybittle

On the brightening air drifts a scent of refreshed stone, moistened soil. She feels the earthy fingerprint of the cold morning air spread over her skin as if she is in the act of undressing. Her body has an early morning weightlessness about it. She might almost be a memory of herself. Conjured up by the sleeping city. — Glenn Haybittle

Every time he is unable to answer one of her questions he feels another theft of strength from his limbs. — Glenn Haybittle

One consequence of ignorance is that it misdirects anger. — Glenn Haybittle

The act of creation, the impetus to undertake it, is always some kind of feeble attempt to understand one's own creation, the nature of creation itself. — Glenn Haybittle

The ditch we were digging cut through the middle of an olive grove. Our supervisor gave us instructions to be careful not to damage the roots of the trees. The minute he was out of sight, overseeing work at another ditch, Carlo would take his pickaxe or shovel and hack at the uncovered roots with a satisfied malice and then mask the destruction he had achieved with a new layer of earth. At the time I thought it madness that someone could believe he was thwarting the fascist war effort by mutilating the roots of a few olive trees. But the world still seemed relatively sane to me in those days before the Nazis arrived in Florence. — Glenn Haybittle

Father love is ancient and austere, like mountains. It is difficult to accept the collapsing of a mountain. — Glenn Haybittle

Children don't expect words to be used to create false trails. Words to Esme are plain and simple with no hidden codes, no duplicitous underlife. He thinks of the conversations with his wife and how little of what they said was without encryption. — Glenn Haybittle

They are flying now above a dreamscape of rollercoasting white cloud crests. It feels sometimes like a premonition of death. Being so high up in the sky where no other living creature can survive. Where there is nothing solid. Just shifting transparency, luminous endless space. — Glenn Haybittle

Everything sacred begins with a circle of motion. — Glenn Haybittle