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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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...”

“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.”

“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.”

“Love is life but longer”

“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.”

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

“Everything you areafraid of will never happen. It’s the events you cannotconceive of that happen.”

“. . . 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.”

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

“Dreamers conquered the world long ago.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.”

“Every moment is the paradox of now or never.”

“The present grows within the boundaries of the past.”

“Love requires imagination more than experience.”

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

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

“Coincidences mean you're on the right path.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Sometimes, language is the sound of longing”

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

“Without memory, he thought, man would be invincible”

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

“The love of aman is like a drop of color into something clear.”

“The beauty of artifacts is in how they reassure us we’renot the first to die.”

“For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feellike home.”

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

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