Quotes from Simon Van Booy

When he smiles, they mostly look away. But Martin likes to think they carry his smile for a few blocks – that even the smallest gesture is something grand.

Then, breathing slow, and almost deliberately, stops. But for a moment the old man doesn't realize he is dead. He can feel Martin's heart and mistakes it for his own.

But how do you find the right people-how do you love without smothering them? How do you not suffocate them with all the love you've built up in their absence?

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.

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 bedroom 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. And always without words.

Up here on this forgotten elbow of land, I have nothing to lose, and though I am more afraid now than I have ever been, I am relieved, I am unburdened, I am ascending.

He might be famous (local newspaper or television) for finding it, true—but if fame takes away the thing it celebrates, then Sebastien would prefer the inspired silence. We're all famous in our own hearts anyway.

His father was an attorney in Paris. He met Sebastien's mother on a train to Amsterdam. There were no other seats. They were forced together and found they preferred it.

Your grief is something to be admired – the pain of severance. A scar where something used to be.

isn't it nice how people are all different

I want the sea to tell them I've found someone I want to marry and that I have to say good-bye—

In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment—we are all defined by something we can't change.

She told me that love is when a person introduces you to yourself for the first time. After

Now on a sloping meadow hours into a fresh day, he found himself a desperate man, struggling to free himself from the shackles of a life he had not pursued. And her voice trickled through him, an icicle perpetually melting.

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. I

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. Magda

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.

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

Winter is for dreaming

I live in Rome where people sit by fountains and kiss. The sound of water is the sound of love rushing between them.

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

But war only ends for those who have not been in one.

Each year is like putting a new coat over all the old ones. Sometimes I reach into the pockets of my childhood and pull things out.

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.