Simon Van Booy Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes I wake up and lie still enough to hear a petal drop from the vase of flowers. Sometimes I lie awake and wish there was someone to hear my falling. — Simon Van Booy

[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them. — Simon Van Booy

night was like a horse that tore through the forest of memory. As — Simon Van Booy

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

His father was an attorney in Paris. He met Sebastien's mother on a train to Amsterdam. There were no other seats. They were forced together and found they preferred it. — Simon Van Booy

They haven't made love for years but sleep holding hands — Simon Van Booy

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

He still is a little boy waiting for someone to love him. — Simon Van Booy

I suppose the key to a good life is to gently overlook the truth and hope that at any moment we can all be reborn. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet.
It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones:
The history of how you felt. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

We see in others what we want and what we fear. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

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

Dreams are the unfinished wings of our souls. — Simon Van Booy

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

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. — Simon Van Booy

Love between strangers takes only a few seconds and can last a whole life. — Simon Van Booy

I want the sea to carry my unceasing love to their still bodies, — Simon Van Booy

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

Everything you are
afraid of will never happen. It's the events you cannot
conceive of that happen. — Simon Van Booy

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 — Simon Van Booy

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

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. — Simon Van Booy

. . . truth is just a lie that everyone believes. — Simon Van Booy

I think music is what language once aspired to be. Music allows us to face God on our own terms because it reaches beyond life. — Simon Van Booy

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

Where are people going? I wonder what they hope will happen and what they are afraid of? For me it's the same thing and has to do with being loved. — Simon Van Booy

We had spent only a few weeks together, five years ago, but when you finally meet the person who in daydreams you had sculpted without words, the transparency of time becomes the color of hair, and shapeless years become the shape of lips. — Simon Van Booy

A stiff breeze had claimed Athens, filling bedrooms, rearranging the tops of desks, touching everything and nothing, as if searching for something it no longer recognized. — Simon Van Booy

If you travel too often, you actually come face-to-face with what you're trying to escape. I feel like when I travel alone, sometimes it's like being locked in a hotel room with my own worst enemy. — Simon Van Booy

Lives are staged from within. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

I wanted to explain that trusting is harder than being trusted. — Simon Van Booy

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

Anyone who is desperate or alone will agree there is comfort in routine. — Simon Van Booy

You can't put a price on the rituals of love, because you never know what will happen next. I suppose fear is part of the excitement and we can't have one without the other. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

Hands have their own language. — Simon Van Booy

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 — Simon Van Booy

Both my parents were very supportive of me in whatever I wanted to do. — Simon Van Booy

The very best and the very worst of life will come from [their] ability to love strangers. — Simon Van Booy

Now on a sloping meadow hours into a fresh day, he found himself a desperate man, struggling to free himself from the shackles of a life he had not pursued. And her voice trickled through him, an icicle perpetually melting. — Simon Van Booy

The coat-check line is long enough to fall in love with the person behind you. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

I think we keep these moments of rejection and acceptance very close. I think we carry them always, like cracked shells from which a part of us once hatched. — Simon Van Booy

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

I once saved someone from drowning. — Simon Van Booy

The present grows within the boundaries of the past. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

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? — Simon Van Booy

Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty. — Simon Van Booy

I was afraid of the sea when I was a girl. Someone said it went on forever and that frightened me. I wondered why my parents had chosen to live at the beginning and the end of the world. — Simon Van Booy

See - this book belongs to you,' Hannah said sweetly.
'No young lady,' the birdman said. 'It belongs to you - but you don't belong to it.'
He leaned in very close to her.
'You belong to you,' he said. — Simon Van Booy

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

Gerard feels stabbing love for his daughter. — Simon Van Booy

Dreamers conquered the world long ago. — Simon Van Booy

Without memory, he thought, man would be invincible — Simon Van Booy

He wanted to tell the baby that Paris was like a poem in stone. — Simon Van Booy

Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us. — Simon Van Booy

I would give everything, even memory - especially memory - if I could hold Leo again. The weight of his absence is the weight of the entire world. I — Simon Van Booy

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

Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained. Music and love are the same. — Simon Van Booy

My old geography professor once told his class how the music, paintings, sculptures, and books of the world are mirror in which people see versions of themselves. — Simon Van Booy

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

Death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept. — Simon Van Booy

As a single parent, I had become tyrannical in order to survive, and anything I couldn't control caused me enormous anxiety. As a naturally untidy, disorganised man who never made lists or kept receipts, morphing into someone who could take care of a toddler on his own may have caused me to overcompensate a little. — Simon Van Booy

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

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. — Simon Van Booy

For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched. — Simon Van Booy

We touched with a softness that pushed through the skin into memory, like arms plunged into a river - we could feel the weight of each other's stones. — Simon Van Booy

As an archaeologist, I've often wondered how we as a race keep going through all the misery. The answer is revealed: the potential for closeness with strangers. Floating — Simon Van Booy

Love is also a violence, and cannot be undone. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

That night she admitted her compulsion to escape. She was worried that if my father drowned, or I disappeared, she would be left with nothing. By running away at least she would have the joy of knowing she was missed. — Simon Van Booy

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

In world mythology, there are countless examples of tragic characters whose greatest strength is also the source of their undoing. But the ancient Greeks and Romans also held the view that acceptance is the beginning of wisdom. — Simon Van Booy

Death ends a life but not a relationship. I — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

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

I never want her to know that fatherhood was the ambition of my life. — Simon Van Booy

But those who seek only reassurance from life will never be more than tourists - seeing everything and trying to possess what can only be felt.
Beauty is the shadow of imperfection. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

I can't stop thinking that everybody is somebody's child. — Simon Van Booy

I find hunger more interesting than accomplishment. — Simon Van Booy

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. — Simon Van Booy

There are times in life when language fails us, when everything that needs to be said can be expressed only by saying nothing at all. — Simon Van Booy

My love for you will always be stronger than any truth. — Simon Van Booy

But sometimes, when confronted by something of unfathomable beauty, the bars of the cage around us begin to tremble. So I ran away to protect myself and remained a prisoner. — Simon Van Booy

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

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. — Simon Van Booy

The passions we cannot control are the ones that define us. — Simon Van Booy

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

She once told me that she loved me because I was the only thing she could hear. She can feel the vibration of the strings through the carved vessel of her instrument, but I am inside her. I am a song soaked into each bone of her secret body where the world has not been able to wander. — Simon Van Booy