147 Quotes by Glenn Haybittle

He feels he has to accept their bond isn't as exalted as he believed. Just another ordinary relationship with niggling unspoken grudges, mistimed or inappropriate interventions, gross failures in code breaking, secret yearnings for escape, a growing litany of treasons and resentments.

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.

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

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.

Did you know the English wouldn’t dream of putting olive oil on food? They use it for ear infections. Freddie told me.” "Yes, I’ve heard their cuisine hasn’t evolved since the Middle Ages.

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.

Since the advent of war many things have happened to him that he could not possibly have imagined. He wonders if this is one of the subliminal reasons men wage war. To increase the daily frequency of surprise and shock. The forerunners of revelation.

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.

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.