Simon Van Booy Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Simon Van Booy
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
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.

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
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
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
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

Simon Van Booy
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.

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

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

Simon Van Booy
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.

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

Simon Van Booy
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.

Simon Van Booy
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.

Simon Van Booy
The beauty of artifacts is in how they reassure us we're
not the first to die.

Simon Van Booy
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?

Simon Van Booy
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
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
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.

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

Simon Van Booy
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