The Memory Tree Quotes

“It’s in our dreams that we pull people towards us.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“Italian as a language, she thinks, suits children with its singsong cadences and rising lingering inflections, its quick swinging gait and easy adaptability to argument, to passionate outbursts.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“It’s our memories that teach us who we are.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“The panic attacks have been a part of Zinnia’s life for almost six months. They allow no pathway back to the innocent complacency with which she once made sense of the world around her. With every new attack more of her identity crumbles. Every day the panic rubs something else out that has been achieved with application, sometimes with inspiration.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“Italy, like areas of her childhood, is a part of her world she has always kept secret from her husband. These are places she goes to renew her virginity.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“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.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“At that moment the ghost dance seems to Zinnia like the relationship of two people who never quite consummate the love they feel for each other.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“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.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“Landscapes of fields and small clusters of buildings hurtle past outside like fragments of songs never sung in their entirety.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“The less bravely we live the more stifling becomes our fear of death.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“The temptation to betray a secret, always breathing its hot breath in your ear.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“Agreements have to be made in the dark for them to be binding.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“Every night I build a fire for you, Alowa. Every night I dance on the rooftop for you. Look at the flames, Alowa. Aren’t they beautiful? Look at the smoke. I’m dancing in the smoke, Alowa.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“There are olive trees outside and the imagined smell of their bark and silvered leaves brings with it the first unfurling of some new imperative she feels coiled up within her. Her whole body with a joyful shout know it is back in Italy.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“The cabinets and shelves are a bright busy choreography of oils, shampoos, conditioners, scrubs, lotions, salts, unguents. Zinnia loves buying pots and bottles and tubes of alchemised essences that smell like yearning or intimacy on the skin.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“One consequence of ignorance is that it misdirects anger.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“Felix has always believed that if there is one thing in life that is fated it is our birth, that far-fetched conspiracy of circumstances which have to occur in order for us to get born.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“Hugh is now playing a game on his mobile phone. His greasy fat fingers with bitten down nails surprisingly agile on the keys. The concentration on his face is admirable in a way. It was probably with a similar level of concentration that the theory of relativity was formulated.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“To tell a lie is to risk being caught out and there’s excitement in avoiding traps: it was an aspect of my childhood I was perhaps averse to relinquishing.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“If you’re not going to feel how are you going to know what to think? Isn’t it in the nature of feeling to evolve thought?”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“There they are. Dancing in a circle. Shadows swinging over the snow. Calling upon the ancestors. Each wearing the sacred shirt. Side stepping to the left in time to the echoing heartbeat of the drums and the echoing yearning of the songs. There they are. Dancing in a circle. Shadows swinging over the firelit snow. Calling upon the ancestors. Expecting something wonderful to happen. Everyone singing. We will live again. We will live again.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“She is curled up inside his smell. He always made her feel both safer and smaller – the latter the price of the former.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“On a piece of wasteland in Leeds I once saw a used condom in the grass. A dead and sordid thing. And yet to my thirteen-year-old mind the whole mystery of life seemed to stream through it. Nothing I’ve seen since has been so eloquent of the thrilling and terrifying mysteries of life.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“Everything sacred begins with a circle of motion.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“Power needs plots because plots are secret until they unfold and the most gratifying kind of power is holding onto an explosive secret.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“Never leave home without your memories.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree

“Look how beautiful the flames are, Alowa. Look how beautiful my naked body is, Alowa. Are you looking at my naked body? I’m dancing towards you.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Memory Tree