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Glenn Haybittle Quotes

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Famous Glenn Haybittle Quotes

“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.”

Fame

Book:Scorched Earth

Source: Scorched Earth

“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.”

Women

Book:Byron and Shelley

Source: Byron and Shelley

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

Sadness

Book:Scorched Earth

Source: Scorched Earth

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

Sadness

Book:Scorched Earth

Source: Scorched Earth

“Everyone tells lies to get what they want. First of all we tell lies to ourselves and then we tell them to everyone else. That's what the past becomes - a kind of flower bed in which you're uprooting and replanting all the time.”

Lies

Book:Scorched Earth

Source: Scorched Earth

“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.”

Lies

Book:The Memory Tree

Source: The Memory Tree

“Sometimes, to speak eloquently, you must remain silent. Max knows this. But often to remain silent is a crime.”

Silence

Book:In the Warsaw Ghetto

Source: In the Warsaw Ghetto

“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.”

Fate

Book:The Memory Tree

Source: The Memory Tree

“Life cannot be experienced deeply without kindness, just as life cannot be experienced deeply without art.”

Kindness

Book:The War in Venice

Source: The War in Venice

“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.”

Kindness

Book:In the Warsaw Ghetto

Source: In the Warsaw Ghetto

“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.”

Destiny

Book:Byron and Shelley

Source: Byron and Shelley

“Music can be the medium of sharing experience in a purified and heightened form; but it can also make being alone a stirring and highly privileged place to be.”

Music

Book:Scorched Earth

Source: Scorched Earth

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

Music

Book:Scorched Earth

Source: Scorched Earth

“Bereavement is sometimes like wading across a succession of snowfields with no landmark in sight. You are a lone small figure in a vast barren landscape. Other times it’s like a Ferris wheel ride. Like being strapped into a swinging spinning bucket. The dizzying dislocation from familiar grounded reality.”

Grief

Book:Byron and Shelley

Source: Byron and Shelley

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

Rome Italy

Book:Scorched Earth

Source: Scorched Earth

“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.”

Italy

Book:The Memory Tree

Source: The Memory Tree

“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.”

Italy

Book:The Memory Tree

Source: The Memory Tree

“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.”

Lost Love

Book:In the Warsaw Ghetto

Source: In the Warsaw Ghetto

“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.”

Haunting

Book:The Way Back to Florence

Source: The Way Back to Florence

“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.”

Sacrifice

Book:In the Warsaw Ghetto

Source: In the Warsaw Ghetto

“If you’re not going to feel how are you going to know what to think? Isn’t it in the nature of feeling to evolve thought?”

Feeling

Book:The Memory Tree

Source: The Memory Tree

“Childhood contains prophecies of what awaits us as an adult. No doubt about that. Powerful totems are bound up in trifles.”

Childhood

Book:Byron and Shelley

Source: Byron and Shelley

“Sex is the great equaliser in life. Whether you're rich or poor, smart or stupid, beautiful or ugly, the pleasure pitch of erogenous zones, the quality of orgasm is not affected. Sex gives everyone equal opportunity.”

Sex

Book:Scorched Earth

Source: Scorched Earth

“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.”

Women Missed Opportunity

Book:The Way Back to Florence

Source: The Way Back to Florence

“She said The Waves was the closest literature had ever come to expressing the blueprint of dance which for her was mapping out and choreographing the secret springs of identity. Dance, she said, was making the inner life visible and giving it a sequential form.”

Dance

Book:The Tree House

Source: The Tree House

“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.”

Dance

Book:The Memory Tree

Source: The Memory Tree

“So much of our life is the circling of a dream. The dream, a changeable elusive presence, is at the heart of our identity, it is the fabric to which all our qualities are stitched. Did it matter that the dream never found fruition in the physical world? The important thing was never to relinquish it. It’s the dream which keeps beauty as an animating source of strength in our lives, which reminds us we are connected to a larger reality.”

Dreams

Book:Byron and Shelley

Source: Byron and Shelley

“Marriage might be the most consuming and documented experience of one’s life but entire stretches of it unfold in a kind of blinkering displacing mist.”

Marriage

Book:Byron and Shelley

Source: Byron and Shelley

About the Author

Known for: Author
Quotes: 28

Books & Sources

Scorched EarthRelated source material

Byron and ShelleyRelated source material

The Memory TreeRelated source material

In the Warsaw GhettoRelated source material

The Way Back to FlorenceRelated source material

The Tree HouseRelated source material

The War in VeniceRelated source material