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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“...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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Hands have their own language.”

“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.”

“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.”