Quote

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.

Simon Van Booy

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Simon Van Booy
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: January 1
Author
Novelist
Writer
Seems
Imagined
Never
Shape
People
Shapes
Meet
Seem
Often
True
Vividly
Also
Yearn

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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.
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For some people, life is the process of knocking through walls to get out. For others, it is the building of walls.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.
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You were unsure which pain is worse -- the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.
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Love is also a violence, and cannot be undone.
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It's tempting to imagine how we could hurt someone close, because it reminds us how fiercely we love them.
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But say you do find the right people - how do you love them without smothering them?...How do you not suffocate them with all the love you've built up in their absence?
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Coincidences mean you're on the right path.
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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.
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The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.
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