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.”

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

“Death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept.”

“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 chan...”

“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 co...”

“Every moment is the paradox of now or never.”

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

“[I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.”

“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 a...”

“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 k...”

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

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