Glenn Haybittle Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Florence is actually a very fateful city. Often one has a sense of Florence answering one back, if you know what I mean.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I've always believed first impressions are paramount in life. That we have access to much we need to know about a person in the blink of an eye. That everything subsequently broadcasted is a confirmation of knowledge already fermenting in the distillery of the unconscious. Heightened curiosity discloses and absorbs a wealth of coded information.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

My mother later blamed the Cold War and the threat of nuclear extinction for all her shortcomings as a mother. She said the state of fear she lived in during that period froze over all other feelings. That was the explanation for her aversion to touching me or even being emotionally present when I needed reassurance. I didn't accept it as a valid excuse at the time, but now I'm older I understand better the crippling consequences of mental health issues.

Fame, like being in love, can at times bring with it the conceited (and obnoxious) belief that you are a somebody person in a world of nobody people.

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.

This part of Warsaw has always been an extension of home for her, part of her shape, a responsive intimate part of her identity. So much she was attached to, so much that lent her footholding weight is now obliterated. It's as if one of the mirrors by which she recognises herself has ceased to reflect her. The teetering balancing act of unsupported walls makes her feel unsteady on her own legs. Buildings taken for granted are no longer standing. There are voids where previously history stood. Feathers like snowflakes rise up into the smoke infested air as if she is inside a macabre snow globe.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Personal relationships are paramount in life. At their best they can confirm the highest ideals we have about human life. Relationships are how we learn about ourselves. How we evolve, both as individuals and communities. How we learn about the world around us. Relationships are the most accessible source of inspiration. They can bring us to our knees; they can move us close to heaven. Personal relationships are our sacred text, our scripture.

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.

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.

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

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.

Never leave home without your memories.

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.

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

I feel some nostalgia for the old red buses of the past that you could hop on and off at will. Nowadays the only way out of a bus is a door you can't open with your own hands. How smugly proud we are of our new-found freedoms in the West - always bragging about them and trying to export them further afield - and yet every year some sly little technological theft of our autonomy is surreptitiously introduced into everyday life. I mean, what better definition of prison is there than an enclosed space whose door you can't open with your own hands?

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.

It's only when I'm sad that I feel truly wise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hiding compels a heightened intimacy with oneself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Artists, like criminals, are dependent on a jury.

The riverside palaces are reflected in the water on either side of the river as rippling golden wafers. There is a pink underglow on the marble façade of San Miniato on the hill. The mosaic of Christ reflecting the benediction of the sun's dying rays over the city.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sadness, essentially, is the ghost of happiness.

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.

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

Music makes you feel younger, more confident you can take on the world and the obstacles it throws at you.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.