Simon Van Booy
Grief is a room without doors - but somehow, with its tinsel and cliches, Christmas finds a way in.Collection: Christmas
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.Collection: Courage
Single parenting is sometimes just a case of sitting around by yourself in mild despair, not knowing what to do.Collection: Parenting
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.Collection: Children
For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.Collection: Lonely
Hands have their own language.Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Memories
The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.Collection: Silence
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.Collection: Beautiful
You were unsure which pain is worse -- the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.Collection: Pain
Whether you know it or not, we leave parts of ourselves wherever we go.Collection: Knows
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.Collection: Rain
It’s the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones: the history of how you felt.Collection: Children
For some people, life is the process of knocking through walls to get out. For others, it is the building of walls.Collection: Wall
Every moment is the paradox of now or never.Collection: Now Or Never
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.Collection: Acceptance
Children are the closest we have to wisdom and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.Collection: Children
Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us.Collection: Understanding
Love between strangers takes only a few seconds and can last a whole life.Collection: Love Is
Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained. Music and love are the same.Collection: People
Actually, years mean nothing. It's what's inside them.Collection: Mean
To love again, you must not discard what has happened to you, but take from it the strength you'll need to carry on.Collection: Needs
I read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.Collection: Book
When I was in my early twenties, I fell in love at least 20 times a day. You have to be with someone where you think: if the world was full of people like you, I could not be monogamous. As you get older, you get to know yourself a little more. The older you get, the more you realize what you need. And you also realize how your choice in relationships is influenced by how you grew up. Now I feel like I've explored the dynamic of how I grew up, and I'm free to find someone who's really going to be a wonderful companion.Collection: Thinking
I think you can love someone and be infatuated with them, too. But infatuation is immediate, while the sort of love in the West is something you build with someone. It's a trust.Collection: Thinking
Dreamers conquered the world long ago.Collection: Long Ago
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.Collection: Lonely
There are some lies that, under the right circumstances, are the only truthCollection: Lying
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.Collection: Beautiful
Sometimes, language is the sound of longingCollection: Sound
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. And I'm much less likely to be indifferent. For me, indifference is the end of life.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Enemy
Life just swallows you up, doesn't it?Just swallows you up with its everyday thingsCollection: Everyday Things
Anyone who is desperate or alone will agree there is comfort in routine.Collection: Comfort
I wanted to explain that trusting is harder than being trusted.Collection: Harder
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.Collection: Lonely
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.Collection: Grief
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.Collection: Falling In Love
Succes is really nothing more than the record of failure. To be successful means you must be willing to fail more than anyone else.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Distance
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.Collection: Love Is
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.Collection: Giving Up
I want to do things for people they will never forget. Maybe that’s the best thing I can do in life.Collection: People
Coincidences mean you're on the right path.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Reading
The present grows within the boundaries of the past.Collection: Past
Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.Collection: Writing