Top 120 Glenn Haybittle Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “And who isn’t less innocent than they lead us to believe? That’s one of the fundamental truths about human nature.”

— Glenn Haybittle

52. “He loves the painting. Whenever he stands before it he feels the world is sharing a secret with him.”

— Glenn Haybittle

53. “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

54. “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

55. “It’s our memories that teach us who we are.”

— Glenn Haybittle

56. “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

57. “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

58. “Sacrifice is perhaps the hardest discipline of all to learn in life. It’s often to belittle yourself to the agency of something greater. You have to believe in that something greater.”

— Glenn Haybittle

59. “Strange, she thinks, how vulnerable the back of your neck feels when you listen to silence.”

— Glenn Haybittle

60. “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

61. “The less bravely we live the more stifling becomes our fear of death.”

— Glenn Haybittle

62. “Florence exists to educate our memory.”

— Glenn Haybittle

63. “And intimacy is what I most love in life. Good painting has that quality. Makes you feel intimate with it.”

— Glenn Haybittle

64. “Landscapes of fields and small clusters of buildings hurtle past outside like fragments of songs never sung in their entirety.”

— Glenn Haybittle

65. “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

66. “Every time he is unable to answer one of her questions he feels another theft of strength from his limbs.”

— Glenn Haybittle

67. “Memories of shame have greater reserves of power to haunt than even memories of love.”

— Glenn Haybittle

68. “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

69. “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

70. “The key to understanding every story is to find yourself in it.”

— Glenn Haybittle

71. “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

72. “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

73. “There’s something liberating about the absence of home comforts which appeals to the child in us. It’s perhaps the first time in our lives when we get a hint of how exciting it can be to be naked.”

— Glenn Haybittle

74. “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

75. “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

76. “In life, the narrative must go on. We’re prisoners of our storylines. No one quite knows how or why they develop. And we have to cope with them as best we can, even when they push us over a new frontier.”

— Glenn Haybittle

77. “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

78. “Sometimes you begin something believing it will soon be over but discover it carries on under its own steam. Perhaps there’s some mysterious untouchable law that dictates the length of everything.”

— Glenn Haybittle

79. “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

80. “It’s in our dreams that we pull people towards us.”

— Glenn Haybittle

81. “She is like the rain that loosens the scent from things.”

— Glenn Haybittle

82. “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

83. “Perhaps it is both the tragedy of life and the blessing of life that most moments only happen once.”

— Glenn Haybittle

84. “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

85. “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

86. “The trouble with painting though, with all art, is you can’t prove you’re better. It’s not like a hundred-yard sprint where there’s a piece of technology to indisputably grade the contestants. Artists, like criminals, are dependent on a jury.”

— Glenn Haybittle

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “Songs carry memories almost as reliably and poignantly as smells.”

— Glenn Haybittle

91. “I’ve always loved walking through cities at dawn. The sense it gives you of entering into a new existence with a clean slate.”

— Glenn Haybittle

92. “Rome lifts you up but won’t let you settle down – it turns you into a bird without a nest.”

— Glenn Haybittle

93. “I suspect nothing has more power to alienate one from the wellsprings of all one’s creative vitality than being trapped in a loveless marriage. Probably they are the people who no longer feel special, the unhappily married.”

— Glenn Haybittle

94. “Somewhere at the back of your mind is a blueprint of the real life you feel you ought to be living. Now and again a moment from this life breaks through into the everyday.”

— Glenn Haybittle

95. “Sometimes I think to learn an adult perspective on life is simply to become good at telling lies, mostly of a flattering nature and mostly to oneself.”

— Glenn Haybittle

96. “It’s like men and women sing different words to the same song.”

— Glenn Haybittle

97. “Sadness, essentially, is the ghost of happiness.”

— Glenn Haybittle

98. “There are one or two places in the world that know our secrets.”

— Glenn Haybittle

99. “Women will always love a man who climbs in through their window, even though, as a general rule, they can’t help marrying a man who waits patiently outside their front door.”

— Glenn Haybittle

100. “Beauty is a private moment in the mind, which we then seek to communicate.”

— Glenn Haybittle