The Way Back to Florence Quotes

“Artists, like criminals, are dependent on a jury.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“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.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“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.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“Father love is ancient and austere, like mountains. It is difficult to accept the collapsing of a mountain.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“The painting you saw in your mind was beautiful when it was your secret. Once it’s on the canvas it’s as if someone else has got hold of your secret and sullied it, distorted it.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“She inhales the peppery warm breath of the cypresses. She loves their scent. It’s a scent that seems to make moments memories even before they’ve stopped happening.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“The sight of Florence below, the cluster of churches and towers and palaces tiered up on either side of the river, is as familiar as his own hand, as surreal as any nightmare. The setting of many of the most intimate and heartening moments of his life. Taunting him now with a spell of inaccessibility. 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.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“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.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“Children don’t expect words to be used to create false trails. Words to Esme are plain and simple with no hidden codes, no duplicitous underlife. He thinks of the conversations with his wife and how little of what they said was without encryption.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“When he turns inland he sees two moving white columns in the sky. At first glance he thinks they are emissions of smoke. The two encroaching formations ripple into funnels and then spread out beneath the labyrinthine coral of clouds into fans. His vision blurs for a moment. Then he realises he is witnessing two perfectly synchronised flocks of birds. The abstract shapes they form are flawless. He stands with his hands in his pockets as the birds taper into a long undulating line, which gently vanishes behind the surface of things. The same thing has happened to his father. He has vanished behind the surface of things.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“Today she feels she is the master of her craft. Today she is free of the grinding tyranny of doubt. The voice that mocks her ambition. The voice that bites and slanders and causes her more heartache than any other voice. Today she is focused, she is exultant. Her every brushstroke like a wake of radiance. Today she can move the paint around the canvas at will. If only painting were like this every day. Without the sudden extinguishing of light, the collapsing of belief, the cursing and flailing, the knots and clenched fists in a world gone suddenly dark.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“Isabella pauses as something in her body holds itself erect, then arches towards the voice of Oskar’s little girl, like a flower tilting under the weight of its hoard of pollen.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“Superstition in wartime takes a more powerful hold on the mind. One sees omens in everything. One is returned to a more primitive view of the world and its sign language.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“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.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“And who isn’t less innocent than they lead us to believe? That’s one of the fundamental truths about human nature.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“Venice can wash through you all the memories you have never made.”
― glenn haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“She is like the rain that loosens the scent from things.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“When darkness settles over the city two prongs of light suddenly reach high up into the night sky. The searchlights remain fixed, two bright smoking fingers lighting up the underside of clouds and providing a canopy of light over the city. She feels enchantment forging a ring around the moment.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“And intimacy is what I most love in life. Good painting has that quality. Makes you feel intimate with it.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“The snow, the effect of concealment and secrecy it creates, makes him think of the brutality of the wartime legislation to forbid and violently extract secrets. It is as if the hushed white landscape is showing how sacrosanct are our secrets, how much of our vitality is bound up in them.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“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.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“The act of creation, the impetus to undertake it, is always some kind of feeble attempt to understand one’s own creation, the nature of creation itself.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“They are flying now above a dreamscape of rollercoasting white cloud crests. It feels sometimes like a premonition of death. Being so high up in the sky where no other living creature can survive. Where there is nothing solid. Just shifting transparency, luminous endless space.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“You know when you’re on a train at a station and there’s another train opposite and the other train starts moving and there’s that utterly convincing illusion that it’s your train that is moving and you feel a bit disorientated when you realise you’re still standing still. That’s what my life has been like since Freddie left.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“She is a wiry blanched creature with no beauty. Her expression reminds him of a crumpled letter – there is both sadness and anger in it.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“Perhaps it is both the tragedy of life and the blessing of life that most moments only happen once.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“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.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“When he thinks of his wife now it is like walking barefoot down steps to the sea at night. A secretive act. A moment of wonder he treats with caution as though shielding a buffeted flame.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“The ripped open houses with their exposed arrangements, their laid bare secrets, are like portraits. Each one has its own individual facial expression. More identity is on display in the midst of the destruction. More intimacy. It makes her realise how vulnerable these achievements are. Identity. Intimacy.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence

“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.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Way Back to Florence