Quotes from Simon Van Booy

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.

He wanted to tell the baby that Paris was like a poem in stone.

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.

You are in the place that was meant for you. Everything had to be arranged like this to get you here.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I was afraid of the sea when I was a girl. Someone said it went on forever and that frightened me. I wondered why my parents had chosen to live at the beginning and the end of the world.

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

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.

He realized this early on, and realized too that what people think are their lives are merely its conditions. The truth is closer than thought and lies buried in what we already know.

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

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.

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.

He still is a little boy waiting for someone to love him.

You may wonder why I haven't killed myself because living with madness or watching it flood the heart of someone we love is unbearable.

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

She said that one day they would be very old, that the world would be a different place, but it would always be their world, and that the time apart now would be a nightmare from which they would recover - desperation buried under years of happiness.

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.

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.

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.

As an archaeologist, I've often wondered how we as a race keep going through all the misery. The answer is revealed: the potential for closeness with strangers. Floating