Glenn Haybittle > Quotes

“Artists, like criminals, are dependent on a jury.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“The key to understanding every story is to find yourself in it.”
― Glenn Haybittle, In the Warsaw Ghetto

“Do you know what the most secret stubbornly-defended part of our identity is? It’s the private concessions we make to our cowardice.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“It’s in our dreams that we pull people towards us.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“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, The Memory Tree

“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, The Way Back to Florence

“We all fashion ourselves to the false world in which we live and in so doing become false ourselves. I saw this all the time during the occupation. How people could convince themselves that locking up and deporting Jews, including children, was a rational consequence of events. How the same people who shrugged off news of executions and deportations were beside themselves with rage when someone tried to jump a queue.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“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 Way Back to Florence

“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 Way Back to Florence

“Father love is ancient and austere, like mountains. It is difficult to accept the collapsing of a mountain.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“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, The Way Back to Florence

“Memories are like the heart; you mustn’t ask too much of them. Just let them get on quietly with their schooling.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“My first impression of Venice was that it might be hard to make anything happen there. Everything seemed to have already happened. Venice seemed like a kind of exalted remembering.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“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, The Way Back to Florence

“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, The Way Back to Florence

“Kindness is probably the most underrated human quality. We tend to dismiss it when we come across it and seek out more exciting character traits. But kindness is often a refined form of courage. It brings light and warmth into the world. You should always value kindness when you find it.”
― Glenn Haybittle, In the Warsaw Ghetto

“It’s our memories that teach us who we are.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“Hiding compels a heightened intimacy with oneself.”
― Glenn Haybittle, In the Warsaw Ghetto

“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, The Way Back to Florence

“She quickly learned that the sight of Venice at given moments can root you in your deepest longings. It can also make you realise your identity too is built on shifting water, consists of rising and falling tides, countless ephemeral reflections and refractions. Venice can wash through you the love you have never made, the battles you have never fought, the beauty you have never created. It can flood to the surface everything you have lost and everything you have never known. It can reveal you to yourself without your carnival masks.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The War in Venice

“The Nazis were good at creating hatred. And when you hate you feel a need to triumph. That triumph Hitler knew for a while but it was always denied to me.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“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 Way Back to Florence

“He suspects you don't truly know anyone until you've seen how they cope with fear.”
― Glenn Haybittle, In the Warsaw Ghetto

“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 Way Back to Florence

“Nothing makes a person more untrustworthy than to be motivated primarily by fear.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“You'd like to think the death of a person is like the death of a star, that it will enrich the cosmos with precious elements, with added meaning.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The War in Venice

“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 Memory Tree

“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, The Way Back to Florence

“He loves the painting. Whenever he stands before it he feels the world is sharing a secret with him.”
― Glenn Haybittle, In the Warsaw Ghetto

“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, The Way Back to Florence