Best 35 quotes of Glenn Haybittle on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

Do you know what the most secret stubbornly-defended part of our identity is? It’s the private concessions we make to our cowardice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

He suspects you don't truly know anyone until you've seen how they cope with fear.

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.

In Max's experience whenever a person ceases to be a stranger reality either expands or constricts.

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.

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.

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

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

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

One consequence of ignorance is that it misdirects anger.

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

Relationships bring out the best in one, but they also bring out the worst. I'm not sure I want to subject anyone to the worst in me. Neither do I want to experience it myself. My insufficiencies, my immaturities, my insecurities. Alone, I avoid the worst of myself.

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.

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.

Songs carry memories almost as reliably and poignantly as smells.

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

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.

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

There are no parks in the ghetto; barely any trees. She misses the smell of the refreshed earth, the flickering green light beneath overhanging foliage, the flight of birds over water. She misses the distinctive individual timbre of each of Warsaw’s church bells. She misses walking home at night through the fragrance of tree pollen and the laughter of lovers. Only books now enable her to experience many of the blessings of the natural world she loves but has never until now fully appreciated. She lives wholeheartedly inside every novel she reads.

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.

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.

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.

Today is a good day. 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.

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.

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.

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.