Simon Van Booy Quotes

[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.

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

Coincidences mean you're on the right path.

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

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.

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

I think people would be happier if they admitted things more often. In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment - we are all defined by something we can’t change.

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.

The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.

Love between strangers takes only a few seconds and can last a whole life.

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

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

Every moment is the paradox of now or never.

When small drops began to fall and darken the world in penny-shaped circles, no one around him scurried for cover. For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.

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.

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

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.

For some people, life is the process of knocking through walls to get out. For others, it is the building of walls.

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.

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

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

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

Dreamers conquered the world long ago.

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

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.

You can’t explain love” he said out loud. “That’s how it gets ruined.

Sometimes, language is the sound of longing

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

I wanted to explain that trusting is harder than being trusted.

Every day is a masterpiece, even if it crushes you.

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

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.

Love requires imagination more than experience.

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

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.

When it rains, even the most insignificant puddle is a map of the universe.

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.

Love is life but longer

. . . truth is just a lie that everyone believes.

Absence makes the heart grows fonder, doesn't it?

Hands have their own language.

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

Without memory, he thought, man would be invincible

Love is also a violence, and cannot be undone.

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.

Everything you are afraid of will never happen. It’s the events you cannot conceive of that happen.

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

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

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

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.

Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land.

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

When somebody leaves this plane—or, if you like, goes into another room—those left behind sometimes try and stop loving—but this is a mistake, because even if you have loved only once in your life, you’re ruined.

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.

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.

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.

The present grows within the boundaries of the past.

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.

Anyone who is desperate or alone will agree there is comfort in routine.

There are some lies that, under the right circumstances, are the only truth

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.

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.

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

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

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

Maybe happiness is just finding the right people at the right time." "But how do you find them?" ... "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?" "You don't. And that's the whole point - it works in a way it just wouldn't with other people.

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.

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...

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.

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

...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.

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

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

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

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.

Perhaps he had been waiting all along for someone to knock him down and allow him to drop the weight he’d so faithfully carried.

Love is like life but longer.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We all have different lives, Martin believes – but in the end probably feel the same things, and regret the fear we thought might somehow sustain us.

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

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.

In that moment of recognition he is not consumed by a rushing sensation of love-quite simply a door opens to a room that has never gone away. The years apart were just years without one another.

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

You may wonder why I haven’t killed myself because living with madness or watching it flood the heart of someone we love is unbearable.

The only consolation of being the last to go is knowing the people you loved the most won't suffer the way you do in their absence.

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.

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

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.

. . . 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.

She said that one day they would be very old, that the world would be a different place, but it would always be their world, and that the time apart now would be a nightmare from which they would recover - desperation buried under years of happiness.

And you realize that you've finally grown up. That youth has finished. In its place you have knowledge, which you must carry. You must also learn to accept that death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept. From this moment on, you will always be conscious of what you are doing. And any future feeling, whether joy or grief or excitement or regret, will come now with an awareness of its own end - with shadows you never noticed in youth. Variation of feeling will become depth of feeling. And you will appreciate tiny things - and step with the confidence of someone overjoyed to know he is doomed.

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.

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. I feel moments from the end. The muscles in my bowing arm tighten. The final notes are sonorous I steady my bow like an oar held in a river steering us all toward the bank of now and tomorrow and the day after that. Days ahead like open fields. And night pools outside the concert hall. The city is still wet. The concert hall is glassed in and overlooks a garden. Eyes of rain dot the windows and shiver with each breath of wind. Stars fill the sky then drop to flood the streets and the squares. When it rains even the most insignificant puddle is a map of the universe.