Simon Van Booy > Quotes

“You were unsure which pain is worse -- the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.”
― Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After: A Novel

“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, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“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.”
― 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, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“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, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“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, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“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

“Death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept.”
― Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After: A Novel

“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

“I don’t see the point of truth anymore, it causes just as much heartbreak as lying.”
― Simon Van Booy, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“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, Everything Beautiful Began After: A Novel

“For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.”
― Simon Van Booy

“We see in others what we want and what we fear.”
― Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After: A Novel

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

“For some people, life is the process of knocking through walls to get out. For others, it is the building of walls.”
― Simon Van Booy, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“Coincidences mean you're on the right path.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“Hands have their own language.”
― 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, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

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

“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.”
― Simon Van Booy, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“Dreamers conquered the world long ago.”
― Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After: A Novel

“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, Everything Beautiful Began After: A Novel

“Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained. Music and love are the same.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“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.”
― Simon Van Booy, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“Loneliness is like being the only person left alive in the
universe, except that everyone else is still here.”
― Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After: A Novel

“Love is life but longer”
― Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After: A Novel

“Actually, years mean nothing. It's what's inside them.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“. . . truth is just a lie that everyone believes.”
― Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After: A Novel

“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, Everything Beautiful Began After: A Novel

“The passions we cannot control are the ones that define us.”
― Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After: A Novel

“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

“Love requires imagination more than experience.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“You can’t explain love” he said out loud. “That’s how it gets ruined.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“Love between strangers takes only a few seconds and can last a whole life.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“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, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“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, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel
like home.”
― Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After: A Novel

“I wanted to explain that trusting is harder than being trusted.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“The present grows within the boundaries of the past.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“I didn’t know who she was, but I had this fire inside me for someone I knew existed.”
― Simon Van Booy, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“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, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“Without memory, he thought, man would be invincible”
― Simon Van Booy, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“Love is like life but longer.”
― Simon Van Booy

“Every moment is the paradox of now or never.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“...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, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“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 strand and beautiful symbols.”
― Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories

“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, The Secret Lives of People in Love

“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.”
― Simon Van Booy, The Secret Lives of People in Love