147 Quotes by Glenn Haybittle

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.

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.

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

Over imagine something beforehand and you take the pulse out of it when it happens.

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

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.

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.

The radar directed flak intensifies. Like swarms of angry red-and-yellow-eyed snakes slithering up invisible ropes in the sky. The sky around them is a glittering maelstrom of light. The stars pale into insignificance. Down below the city is lit up in sections as shockwaves fan out in kaleidoscopic bursts. Shell smoke rising up from the ground. On his right a burst of flame and a thick guttering of black smoke lit up by the geometry of the searchlights.

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.