Simon Van Booy Quotes

What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people's dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats - and they in turn can listen to ours.

Things that feel super personal actually feel really universal. It's sort of the more you really identify something specific within yourself, the more people connect to it because ultimately we are all connected in some way.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

I tell stories about people audiences might think they have nothing in common with, then they emotionally connect with them and find they're not different at all.

I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger.

All I want is for people, when they read my books, to feel companioned, to feel they're not alone in the world.

Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.

I think my job is hopefully to connect with people emotionally and to feel less alone or understand things in a certain way.

Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings.

I'm a normal person. I'm just like you and just like everyone else - I have feelings and thoughts.

I think that human beings are often looking for a reason to relate.

We think that this is just our world and we don't know what other people are thinking. Music actually is a phenomenal connector in that respect. It's a special language that defines certain boundaries and connects people in a particular way, a very emotional way, I have found.

Humanity has this need to hear stories because they connect us with other people, they teach us about our own feelings. We feel less lonely when we see other people going through the same things, even if they're fictional characters.

The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.

Sometimes, I look outside, and I think that a lot of other people have seen this snow before. Just like I think that a lot of other people have read those books before. And listened to those songs. I wonder how they feel tonight.

I think we often write because we feel a loneliness, and people read for the same reason, and then they come away feeling a little less lonely.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer nomination (name) for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo narrans, the storytelling person. What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people’s dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats–and they in turn can listen to ours.

There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

I try to find something that applies not to me only, but to others, but don't try to control it too much. Essentially it is about what moves us, teaches us about ourselves.

Each way means loneliness -- and communion.