147 Quotes by Glenn Haybittle

She is curled up inside his smell. He always made her feel both safer and smaller – the latter the price of the former.

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.

Everything sacred begins with a circle of motion.

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.

Women, quite rightly, have a scorn for men who act only with hindsight.

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.

Everyone who dies in Florence has a copy of Great Expectations.

Venice can wash through you all the memories you have never made.

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.