Top 120 Glenn Haybittle Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “Hiding compels a heightened intimacy with oneself.”

— Glenn Haybittle

4. “She is a wiry blanched creature with no beauty. Her expression reminds him of a crumpled letter – there is both sadness and anger in it.”

— Glenn Haybittle

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “Father love is ancient and austere, like mountains. It is difficult to accept the collapsing of a mountain.”

— Glenn Haybittle

13. “He finds himself remembering the night boat trips with his father. The boat easing through the black current. The moonlight silvering the whispering reeds and the leaves overhead. The air pungent with resin and algae and wet earth. The whisper of the willow leaves trailing in the water. His father standing with the oar, as if he owned and orchestrated the entire night.”

— Glenn Haybittle

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “Over imagine something beforehand and you take the pulse out of it when it happens.”

— Glenn Haybittle

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “To hold an object that belonged to someone you have loved and lost alters for a moment the weight of your hand and then the weight of your entire body.”

— Glenn Haybittle

22. “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

23. “He made me forget myself, sometimes the most precious gift one person can give another.”

— Glenn Haybittle

24. “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

25. “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

26. “Artists, like criminals, are dependent on a jury.”

— Glenn Haybittle

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Nothing makes a person more untrustworthy than to be motivated primarily by fear.”

— Glenn Haybittle

32. “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

33. “One consequence of ignorance is that it misdirects anger.”

— Glenn Haybittle

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “He suspects you don’t truly know anyone until you’ve seen how they cope with fear.”

— Glenn Haybittle

38. “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

39. “Sometimes at night the only sound was the syncopated footfalls of a Nazi patrol stiffly marching past in their nailed boots. It was like the noise of a pitiless machine. The sound of those unseen boots created an abyss in the atmosphere that you felt yourself falling into. You can’t imagine how sinister it seemed that they marched in step like that when there was no one around to see them. They didn’t seem like human beings, more like programmed automatons.”

— Glenn Haybittle

40. “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

41. “Outside, he stretches up his arms beneath the brightening sky. His breath and heartbeat like a gift newly restored to him.”

— Glenn Haybittle

42. “I thought of that lost book and all the memories it held and how it was just one of millions of objects in the world loaded with secret history which pass hands until eventually they excite nothing more than mild curiosity or, often, complete apathy. It was like all the sadness and loneliness of life resided in these objects. I realised the moment anything loses its context it becomes a husk.”

— Glenn Haybittle

43. “Agreements have to be made in the dark for them to be binding.”

— Glenn Haybittle

44. “The temptation to betray a secret, always breathing its hot breath in your ear.”

— Glenn Haybittle

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “And who isn’t less innocent than they lead us to believe? That’s one of the fundamental truths about human nature.”

— Glenn Haybittle

50. “It’s astonishing how much of our resilience resides is our routines, even in our things. I sometimes think every person’s chances of surviving this war will be largely how adaptable they are to change.”

— Glenn Haybittle