Simon Van Booy Quotes

I like stories very much," the priest said. "They help me understand myself better.

Single parenting is sometimes just a case of sitting around by yourself in mild despair, not knowing what to do.

Alzheimer's is like having your entire life written out in chalk and then washed over by the sea at every tide.

You were unsure which pain is worse
the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.

Many things are hard, Danny. Life comes at you in pieces sometimes too big to avoid

I wonder if things can happen too early or too late or if everything happens at exactly the right time. If so, how sad and beautiful.

He thinks I suffer from depression. But I'm just quiet. Solitude and depression are like swimming and drowning. In school many years ago, I learned that flowers sometimes unfold inside themselves.

Succes is really nothing more than the record of failure. To be successful means you must be willing to fail more than anyone else.

Whether you know it or not, we leave parts of ourselves wherever we go.

He felt that his life was nothing more than a light that would blink once in the history of the universe and then be forgotten.

They haven't made love for years but sleep holding hands

I think most people in the world are decent if they're not suffering.

The beauty of artifacts is in how they reassure us we're
not the first to die.

We cross from memory into imagination with only a vague awareness of change.

The passions we cannot control are the ones that define us.

Language is like drinking from one's own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at the time.

Actually, years mean nothing. It's what's inside them.

It's tempting to imagine how we could hurt someone close, because it reminds us how fiercely we love them.

Should you ever feel too lonely ... listen for the roar of the sea- for in it are all those who've been and all those who are to come.

Life can unmoor so many feelings; it is a relief we sleep through it.
Night unravels the day and reinvents it for the first time.
We may mean nothing to time, but to each other we are kings and queens, and the world is a wild benevolent garden filled with chance meetings and unexplained departures.

Writers are often alone when they work. Hours pass in silence as one long moment; light fades as day turns back to face the coming night.

It had rained, she said, and I imagined the beads of small water on the windshield like a thousand eyes, or each drop a small imperfect reflection of a perfect moment.

Gerard feels stabbing love for his daughter.

It is the afternoon of my birthday, but still the morning of my life.

Dreamers conquered the world long ago.

But say you do find the right people - how do you love them without smothering them? ... How do you not suffocate them with all the love you've built up in their absence?

I don't see the point of truth anymore, it causes just as much heartbreak as lying.

Thomas realized he had changed, that he was not the same man, but like everyone else, he was the result of an accident that had once taken place between nature and chance. An

We see in others what we want and what we fear.

When a person is loved, they are granted the strength of all seas.

When I'm doing something, I do work hard at it.

Dave once asked me what blind people dream about. Mostly in sound and feeling, I replied. At night I fall in love with a voice, and then wake to a feeling of physical loss. Sometimes I close my eyes to a chorus of "Happy Birthday!" The smell of cake and the sound of feet under the table. I awake in a body that's too big. I also dream in motion and sensation. My father's boat and the snore of the mast; the rough fabric of the safety harness and the rip of Velcro. The sun on my legs. And endless stretch of water impossible to imagine.

In his heart, some tiny piece of what hadn't happened would lodge.

To love again, you must not discard what has happened to you, but take from it the strength you'll need to carry on.

I want to do things for people they will never forget. Maybe that's the best thing I can do in life.

Sometimes, language is the sound of longing

Up here on this forgotten elbow of land, I have nothing to lose, and though I am more afraid now than I have ever been, I am relieved, I am unburdened, I am ascending.

Grief is a room without doors - but somehow, with its tinsel and cliches, Christmas finds a way in.

She once told me how she could feel the missing part of her arm- how she sometimes experienced the sensation of a hand- that it is possible to feel something without its physical presence.
Perhaps love is like this and we are all limbs of one giant intangible body.

I didn't know who she was, but I had this fire inside me for someone I knew existed.

You are hatching from the past.

I can't stop thinking that everybody is somebody's child.

When he smiles, they mostly look away. But Martin likes to think they carry his smile for a few blocks – that even the smallest gesture is something grand.

There is little joy in those first moments of recognition- for the reality is that most encounters of such depth, most first glances of love come to nothing. And while the sincerity of that rare moment when your heart is bursting should be the signal to fling yourself on the ground in the path of this stranger, it's the depth of such sincerity that paralyses you, holds you back from the silence of phrases like "hello" and "good morning."
And as they pass, granting only single, torturous details like fingers upon the handle of an umbrella, or a hair pin bearing the weight of a twist, or a wool collar beaded with pearls of rain- there is only one thing you could ever say that would be true, that would make them stop walking and turn to face you.
But such a thing is unsayable.

He wanted to tell the baby that Paris was like a poem in stone.

I think John Coltrane is one of the great American heroes, like Abraham Lincoln and Emily Dickinson.

It's true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don't meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly.
There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet.

Coincidences mean you're on the right path.

For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.

Love requires imagination more than experience.

Libraries are the ultimate restaurants for brain food. I sleep better knowing there are libraries. I would take a bullet for a librarian.

Life just swallows you up, doesn't it?Just swallows you up with its everyday things

That's truth, Harvey, not what's written on a piece of paper or in blood too small to see - but the memory of how it felt being together.

I think anyone can fall in love, if you're open and you're willing, but the real test is sustaining it after all the excitement has worn off.

She told me that love is when a person introduces you to yourself for the first time. After

Rain says everything we cannot say to one another. t is an ancient sound that willed all life into being, but fell so long upon nothing.

I want the sea to tell them I've found someone I want to marry and that I have to say good-bye -

Every parent, no matter how cultured or sophisticated, will one day succumb to a child's pleas to visit Walt Disney World Resort.

Death ends a life but not a relationship. I

Lives are staged from within.

night was like a horse that tore through the forest of memory. As

When you give something up, you need to fill the space where it used to be, and you understand the landscape in yourself a bit more.

Everything that we love will, at some point, be taken away from us. If I think about everyone I love eventually being taken away from me by death, or simply by getting lost from each other in the world, it makes me value them much more now.

Pain is proof of something worthwhile.

Loneliness is like being the only person left alive in the
universe, except that everyone else is still here.

Reading reassures us that no matter how alone we might feel, there are many others - spread as wide as history itself - who have felt the same way we have, who have occupied the rooms we find ourselves locked in at various points of our lives.

Life had called his name, and without thinking, he had stepped forward. He wondered if perhaps he was becoming the person he had always wanted to be.

In the end I didn't know who I was crying for, but it was something my body wanted to do, as though trying to digest grief.

My love for you will always be stronger than any truth.

Children are the closest we have to wisdom, and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.

For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel
like home.

I want to feel it somehow happened like that because things happen for a reason. I want to believe this more than anything because if it were just an accident, then God must have died before he could finish the world.

the body is nothing but camouflage.

The love of a
man is like a drop of color into something clear.

The present grows within the boundaries of the past.

We may mean nothing to time, but to each other we are kings and queens, and the world is a wild benevolent garden filled with chance meetings and unexplained departures. Magda

Could it be that first love was the only true love? And that after those first fires had been doused or burned out, men and women chose whom they would love based on worldly needs, and then reenacted the rituals and feelings of that first pure experience - nursed the flames that once burned of their own accord ...

Love is also a violence, and cannot be undone.

The key to a good life is to gently overlook the truth

Death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept.

Love is life but longer

I find hunger more interesting than accomplishment.

I tried to convey to the boy how people's lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.

If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony; in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedrooms fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don't know then. But later you realize - that was the moment.

He realized this early on, and realized too that what people think are their lives are merely its conditions. The truth is closer than thought and lies buried in what we already know.

The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.

Without memory, time would be no use to mankind,

When Bach died some of his children sold his scores to the butcher they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.

She told me that while my father's body might be crushed under tons of black earth, the body is nothing but camouflage. She whispered that every soul is a river trying to find its way back to the sea.

He still is a little boy waiting for someone to love him.

You can't explain love" he said out loud. "That's how it gets ruined.

Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.

And he is enchanted by the beauty of small things: hot coffee, wind through an open window, the tapping of rain, a passing bicycle, the desolation of snow on a winter's day.

This is why fashion is such a magical part of our lives, for it inspires our decisions without dictating them; it sets the theme but not the limits of our aesthetic.

Perhaps we were each allotted only a certain amount of love - enough for only an initial meeting - a serendipitous clumsiness. When it leaves to find others, the difficulty begins because we are faced with our humanness, our past, our very being.

I was always a writer, by which I mean I was always scribbling away, doing something with pen and paper.

You are in the place that was meant for you. Everything had to be arranged like this to get you here.

I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person - a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge - is perpetually waving.

Love is like life but longer.

Before I met with my wife, I loved her very much. I didn't know who she was, but I had a fire inside me for someone I knew existed. Now that she hangs out stars, I still love her, though we speak another language altogether.