The Tree House Quotes

“Do you know what the most secret stubbornly-defended part of our identity is? It’s the private concessions we make to our cowardice.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“We all fashion ourselves to the false world in which we live and in so doing become false ourselves. I saw this all the time during the occupation. How people could convince themselves that locking up and deporting Jews, including children, was a rational consequence of events. How the same people who shrugged off news of executions and deportations were beside themselves with rage when someone tried to jump a queue.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“My first impression of Venice was that it might be hard to make anything happen there. Everything seemed to have already happened. Venice seemed like a kind of exalted remembering.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“The Nazis were good at creating hatred. And when you hate you feel a need to triumph. That triumph Hitler knew for a while but it was always denied to me.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“Memories are like the heart; you mustn’t ask too much of them. Just let them get on quietly with their schooling.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“Nothing makes a person more untrustworthy than to be motivated primarily by fear.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“Songs carry memories almost as reliably and poignantly as smells.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“He made me forget myself, sometimes the most precious gift one person can give another.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“I thought of that lost book and all the memories it held and how it was just one of millions of objects in the world loaded with secret history which pass hands until eventually they excite nothing more than mild curiosity or, often, complete apathy. It was like all the sadness and loneliness of life resided in these objects. I realised the moment anything loses its context it becomes a husk.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“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.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“The yellow star subtly shifted the balance of power in our relationship. It made her more alone. And it made me more protective of her which was to admit a new vulnerability in her.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“She said The Waves was the closest literature had ever come to expressing the blueprint of dance which for her was mapping out and choreographing the secret springs of identity. Dance, she said, was making the inner life visible and giving it a sequential form.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“The beginning of an attack I always experienced as a swell lurching up from unseen depths, similar to the physical sensation of standing waist-high in the sea when there are no waves but all of a sudden the great body of water heaves itself up as if the planet has shifted a fraction on its axis. That was the signal for me that the nature of reality was about to terrifyingly change.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“I once conjured up this image of Hitler. I imagined that he didn’t kill himself and that he was kept in a kind of open booth at Auschwitz, like a circus attraction of old times. He had been stripped naked and everyone visiting Auschwitz could let him know what they felt about him. Then I extended the picture. I had hundreds of these booths. There were the SS men who had shot Jews in trenches and in forests, the guards at the camps, the man who owned the company that made the Zyklon B, the men who inserted the canisters into the chutes, the women who had denounced Jews to the secret police and of course all the French gendarmes who took part in the roundup in July 1942. And do you know what I realised? I realised there would be more of my booths than visitors.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“That he possessed living images in his mind of details I had only witnessed on the television, at the cinema – the Nazi flag, the yellow star – made me think of the gulf between the experience of the astronauts who had walked on the moon and all the rest of us for whom the moon is a far blown enigma.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“We had a spell that made her become a boy and made me become a girl.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House