Simon Van Booy Quotations

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.

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.

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

I was living in a large apartment with no furniture, just a typewriter, and because I had nothing else to do with my time, it made me take my writing seriously.

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

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.

The joy of style lies not in how we look to other people, but in how we look to ourselves - and the most memorable and beautiful outfits are simply those that, in some rare moment of joy, we found the courage to share with the world.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Shoes are a neutral blessing for us because feet generally aren't regarded as a place where the battle for self-esteem is won or lost. Feet don't change size when the body does through the natural ageing process.

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

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.

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.

Like surgeons trying to save a life, the conservators and preservers at New York City museums dedicate themselves to ensuring the longevity of works of art for public view.

Both my parents were very supportive of me in whatever I wanted to do.

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

The most frustrating part of trying to direct everything is not that it alienates you from people who genuinely want to help, but that it's actually impossible.

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

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

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.

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

Love is also a violence, and cannot be undone.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Even if you have loved only once in your life, you're ruined.

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

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

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.

Every moment is the paradox of now or never.

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.

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

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

Sometimes, language is the sound of longing

Dreamers conquered the world long ago.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Coincidences mean you're on the right path.

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

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.

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?

Love requires imagination more than experience.

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.

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

The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.

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

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

It’s the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones: the history of how you felt.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The present grows within the boundaries of the past.

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.

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.

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.

Hands have their own language.

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

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

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.