Top 97 Quotes & Sayings by Simon Van Booy

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 once saved someone from drowning.

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.

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.

I find hunger more interesting than accomplishment.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Dreamers conquered the world long ago.

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

Hands have their own language.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Every moment is the paradox of now or never.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Relationships break down, because it's about self. But when you take the "I" out of it and you're like, how can I make them happy, that means sacrifice. I think you have to be prepared to sacrifice, and a lot of people just aren't willing to. You have to give up a piece of yourself. By doing that, you get a greater sense of who you are. 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.

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.

The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.

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

Sometimes, language is the sound of longing

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

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

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

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.

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.

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