147 Quotes by Glenn Haybittle

And intimacy is what I most love in life. Good painting has that quality. Makes you feel intimate with it.

On the brightening air drifts a scent of refreshed stone, moistened soil. She feels the earthy fingerprint of the cold morning air spread over her skin as if she is in the act of undressing. Her body has an early morning weightlessness about it. She might almost be a memory of herself. Conjured up by the sleeping city.

Sometimes at night the only sound was the syncopated footfalls of a Nazi patrol stiffly marching past in their nailed boots. It was like the noise of a pitiless machine. The sound of those unseen boots created an abyss in the atmosphere that you felt yourself falling into. You can’t imagine how sinister it seemed that they marched in step like that when there was no one around to see them. They didn’t seem like human beings, more like programmed automatons.

Every time he is unable to answer one of her questions he feels another theft of strength from his limbs.

Freddie is now officially the enemy. His unauthorised presence in the city a tightrope along which he has to walk back and forth every day. The streets bristle with black shirted men carrying guns who believe themselves taller than they are. Everything he carries within himself becomes secret, something that gives off illegal light and heat inside him. Sometimes he feels like a shadow that glows with this light, this heat.

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.

Often of late she has accused herself of being a hard woman. As if she will not suffer her soil to be raw and tender, will not submit to the vulnerability of the new green shoot.

It’s astonishing how much of our resilience resides is our routines, even in our things. I sometimes think every person’s chances of surviving this war will be largely how adaptable they are to change.

She turns to look down at the tiered vineyards and, beyond, the vignette of Florence in the valley as if scooped up on a spoon. Its domes and spires and rooftops appearing to float on a tide of unearthly mist as inviolate and inaccessible as a private longing.