Raphael Bob Waksberg Quotes

And I thought about how, actually, if you wanted to, you could say the same thing about life. That life is terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when you’re confronted with life you can either be cowardly or you can be brave, but either way you’re going to live. So you might as well be brave.

You deserve someone who will love you in all your damaged glory.

You had every intention of being depressed forever, but as it turns out, there's work to be done, meals to eat, movies to see, errands to run. You meant to be in ruins permanently, your misery a monument, a gash across the cold hard earth, but honestly, who has the time for that? Instead, you survived - apparently, you both did - and things are shockingly okay.

There are two kinds of people, he thought: the people you don’t want to touch because you’re afraid you’re going to break them, and the people you don’t want to touch because you’re afraid they’ll break you.

I fell in love with you a little bit, in that stupid way where you completely make up a fictional version of the person you’re looking at and fall in love with that person.

He had this really amazing party trick where sometimes he could go a full hour without even once being suddenly reminded of the paralyzing truth that his life was finite and unrepeatable.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t have to tell you things, because I feel like when you look at me, you can see everything.

A statue isn't built from the ground up -- it's chiseled out of a block of marble -- and I often wonder if we aren't likewise shaped by the qualities we lack, outlined by the empty space where the marble used to be. I'll be sitting on a train. I'll be lying awake in bed. I'll be watching a movie; I'll be laughing. And then, all of a sudden, I'll be struck with the paralyzing truth: It's not what we do that makes us who are. It's what we don't do that defines us.

And you’ll smile at this man and wonder if he too, like all those who came before him, will someday be a bittersweet memory, will someday be felled by the same foolish blunder of knowing you a little too well and yet also somehow not enough.

BoJack: Life's a bitch and then you die, right? Diane: Sometimes. Sometimes life's a bitch and then you keep living. BoJack: Yeah. Diane: But it's a nice night, huh? BoJack: Yeah.

You can write it all down, you can put it in your book of facts, but the truth is no one can ever really understand the tangle of experiences and passions that makes you who you are. It's a secret collection, a private language, a pebble in your pocket that you play with when you're anxious.

The normal reasons. Like, I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. It’s all the dumb clichés about how even when I’m mad at you I love you and how every day the best part of it is waking up next to you. And it kills me that this is all the normal, typical people-in-love stuff, because I want to believe our love is special—that it’s bigger and more interesting than any love that anyone else has had before—but the heartbreaking truth is my love for you is so consistent and predictable and boring.

People out grow me," he said, in the same blase tone one might say, "That is a tall building." He picked up a stick and chucked it into the water. |Everyone who ever loves me one day outgrows me.

I think you and I share the same disillusionment, sprouted from long-buried hope.

we will laugh about how there was a time, not even that long ago, when we hadn’t even met, and what were we doing not meeting, who were we fooling, whose time were we wasting?

... in that way that you love something when you’re at a place in your life when you’re ready to love something and there’s a thing there that you can love.

The things that are the most important aren’t shared; they are important only to us.

You can put to rest the fear that you were a blip in this other person's life, a footnote. What you did was important. You hurt somebody, and somebody hurt you.

Per-haps every can of cashews has a fake snake lurking, but you keep opening them, stupidly, because in your heart of hearts you still believe in cashews.

But if there's a silver lining here (and you're not sure there is one), it's the assurance that what you had, whatever it was, had weight. It made an impact.

What happened to our society to make it so we view damaged things as somehow incomplete? On the contrary, I, for one, believe it is damage that makes us whole.

And when the Sadness catches up, tracks you down—when you return home one day, arms full of groceries, to find the Sadness sitting at the kitchen table, casually reading a paper as if it never left, eating a muffin as if this were all perfectly natural—when the Sadness looks up at you and says, “What did you think, buddy? What did you think was going to happen?”—when the Sadness smirks at you and says with a wry insistence that unravels you in an instant, “This is the real love story here, buddy, you and me”—when the Sadness reiterates that, sure, certain smaller sadnesses dull, but this Sadness, the Sadness, has seen you through it all; this Sadness, the Sadness, has never strayed from your side, not really, and why would you want it to now, this epitome of stability in an inconsistent world?—when that happens, you can put your groceries down and walk back out the door and close the door behind you.

Move across the country and hope the Sadness won’t find you, won’t follow you like a stray dog from coast to coast.

Most important, though, is the unspoken understanding that both of you are people—weak, wounded, fragile, forgivable people doing the very best you can under the impossible circumstance that is day-to-day existence.

Science will live on after we're all dead. Science will survive with or without our attempts to understand it; science doesn't care.

You're really going to try this time, you swear it, this time you'll do everything not in shades of beige and gray but in bright, bold, brilliant, beautiful color.

It’s okay,” said Debbie. “You know, I used to be super-bummed, but the truth is you can get over anything with enough time. That was the other part of the idea behind the watch, the first part being the thing about you not having to look at your phone. The other part was so that you could remember that time was passing. For most things, really, the only thing to do is just let there be time.

I think you're afraid of putting yourself out there because you're afraid of getting hurt, because your are–and I believe this is the clinical term–a fucking coward.

I don’t think you really love me; I think you’re just terrified of being alone,

I never thought I could be this happy,” she imagined one day saying to someone.

and the man now listed in your phone as “DO NOT CALL HIM” were ever so foolish as to refer to as “home.

Move across the country and hope the Sadness won’t find you, won’t follow you like a stray dog from coast to coast. Hope the Sadness isn’t just a fog on a leash, shadowing you always. Hope the Sadness can’t be as fleet as you are, hope the Sadness is more rooted. Perhaps the Sadness has friends, a family, and can’t just pick up and go. Look at all this stuff the Sadness has here in San Jose or Chapel Hill or wherever you’re currently leaving. How’s the Sadness going to survive without all this stuff? Hope this isn’t one of those any-place-I-hang-my-hat-is-home-type situations where the Sadness hangs its hat on you. Hope that you are not the Sadness’s home, anywhere you go, no matter how far, no matter how quickly—the Sadness lives in you. Hope to God it’s not that.

And you’ll smile at this man and wonder if he too, like all those who came before him, will someday be a bittersweet memory,

One night at a bar late, you pick up a hobby of a person that somehow grows into a habit

Hope that you are not the Sadness’s home, anywhere you go, no matter how far, no matter how quickly—the Sadness lives in you.

The way your mother rolls her eyes at you, your sudden decision to stop eating red meat, the immediate unexplainable sadness you felt when you saw your father’s shirt draped over the back of a chair. You can write it all down, you can put it in your book of facts, but the truth is no one can ever really understand the tangle of experiences and passions that makes you who you are. It’s a secret collection, a private language, a pebble in your pocket that you play with when you’re anxious, hard as geometry, smooth as soap.

a person who gets to know not just the you you sometimes show, but the you you truly are; a person who—when you weren’t looking—slipped a naked, wounded heart into the pocket of your jacket with a bow and a note that said, “handle with care.

After all, what were you hoping for, really? What was this ever going to be, realistically? Isn’t this the best thing that could have possibly happened, for it to have ended now, before somebody really got hurt?

we realize that Friday 18 July, like every day in history before it, was a moment, a twenty-four-hour trick of the light, a thing that happened once and never again. And that sad truth will just about swallow us whole. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Even that shared experience–it's true significance anyway, what it really means–that belongs to you alone.

What if I was zero percent happy, and I walked through the door to find that a hundred percent happy still isn't all that happy? What then?

The memory of whatever spark you had is rusted, corroded, hardly maintained, and scarcely revisited. This was no great affair, this thing. This was no tragic heartbreak. This was just another thing that happened in a long series of things that happened. Here's your stuff back. Have a nice life.

I fell in love with you a little bit, in that stupid way where you completely make up a fictional version of the person you’re looking at and fall in love with that person. But still, I think there was something there.

Every war, no matter how brutal, is built on the premise that one day, when all is said and done, the ends will justify the means. But over and over again we learn that in real life, there is no ends. There’s just the means. All there is is means.

life is terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when you're confronted with life, you can either be cowardly or you can be brave, but either way you're going to live. So you might as well be brave.

She'd climbed in his heart without thinking, the way that a kid idly tongues a loose tooth.

The longer you live here, the more land mines you set.

Every seven years, the cells in our bodies completely replace themselves and we become entirely different people.

But if there was another me, an opposite, someone who did do all the right things—well, I figured, that guy could really be something.

One night, you will wake with a start in this person's bed, you will discover yourself in this person's arms, and you will disentangle yourself for the hundredth time and dress yourself for the hundredth time and try to leave this person's apartment, but when you get to the door there will be a sticky note over the knob that says, 'but what if this time you stayed?

You thought about how one day you would change; you would wake up one morning and all of a sudden everything would be different and all the things that used to make you cry would make you roll your eyes and all the things that used to make you roll your eyes would make you cry.

Settle somewhere fertile, plant a new you and watch you blossom. You can barely remember that old you now, the you who lived in that other place and was Sad. That old you wasn’t you; this is you. This is the you you want to be.

And I imagined that if I were in some other, better universe, there'd be someone who could tell me, it's okay, or you'll get 'em next time, tiger. Someone would tell me that all the stupid things I'd done, all my mistakes, they didn't matter. This someone would say that, no matter what, she was proud of me, that I filled her heart with warmth, and that that's really the most you could hope for in life - to just for an instant make somebody else just a little bit happier. She would tell me that - guess what, - everything was going to be all right.

And I thought about how amazing it is that you can know somebody for sixty years and still not really know that person at all.

You would have thought there'd be more to say to each other this night before you said good-bye forever, but it turns out you'd already said everything.

Something is lost and something is gained. Something is forgotten and something is found.

The emptiness was normal. The harsh incinerating boring awful raw barren obsessive numb five-hundred-volt nothingness now completely consuming her was so totally average.

this person who didn’t know how rare it was to be loved by a person so tender.

Maybe you are right to be cautious. You have been lied to before, after all. Your heart is weathered and scarred, mishandled by many, eroded by time. You’re no dummy, and yet repeatedly, you stumble over the cracks of your cobblestone heart, you let your naked foolish hopes get the better of you.

People outgrow me,” he said, in the same blasé tone one might say, “That is a tall building.” He picked up a stick and chucked it into the water. “Everyone who ever loves me one day outgrows me.

It’s like a movie adaptation of your favorite novel, a theme park ride version of your favorite movie. It’s a Xerox of a Xerox, a shadow of a ghost. It’s gluten-free pasta, this. But at least it’s pasta.

A statue isn’t built from the ground up—it’s chiseled out of a block of marble—and I often wonder if we aren’t likewise shaped by the qualities we lack, outlined by the empty space where the marble used to be.

Hope this isn't one of those any-place-I-hang-my-hat-is-home-type situations where the Sadness hangs its hat on you. Hope that you are not Sadness's home, anywhere you go, no matter how far, no matter how quickly - the Sadness lives in you. Hope to God it's not that.

I look into his eyes and I see love. I see hate and anger. I see revolution and honor and dishonor all at once.

It felt good to have a thing that was mine and mine alone.

I don’t even think about you,” he couldn’t wait to tell her, just as soon as she called him back.

He didn’t trust anyone who looked better in photographs than she did in real life. He was working out a system where eventually he wouldn’t have to trust anybody.

You know, it's like whenever you get lost, just remember to keep your feet on the ground.

You deserve someone who will love you in all your damaged glory.’ 

You can paint a dead herring purple, and you can hang it on the wall, but hard as you try, you can't make it sing.

You can write it all down, you can put it in your book of facts, but the truth is no one can ever really understand the tangle of experiences and passions that makes you who you are. It's a secret collection, a private language, a pebble in your pocket that you play with when you're anxious, hard as geometry, smooth as soap.

Every conversation was punctuated by a long awkward silences - but punctuated the Spanish way, so every sentence was followed by a long awkward silence and preceded by the same awkward silence upside down. --The Average of All Possible Things

You had every intention of being depressed forever, but as it turns out, there’s work to be done, meals to eat, movies to see, errands to run. You meant to be in ruins permanently, your misery a monument, a gash across the cold hard earth, but honestly, who has the time for that?

the odds of stumbling into the lingering smoke of an old flame are staggering, and increasing still with every new significant instant spent with another significant other.

There was no way to tell that for five months and eight days, two people shared something marvelous and intimate and true.

The other part was so that you could remember that time was passing. For most things, really, the only thing to do is just let there be time.

Everything was pushing us imperceptibly toward this moment—if I hadn’t missed that train, if you hadn’t moved for the job, just imagine.

And we will realize that Friday 18 July, like every day in history before it, was a moment, a twenty-four-hour trick of the light, a thing that happened once and never again.

Everyone who ever loves me one day outgrows me.

It's not what we do that makes us who we are. It's what we don't do that defines us.

What you did was important. You hurt somebody, and somebody hurt you.

The goat convulses in my arms, and Dorothy starts laughing. Then she puts her arm up and juts her chin out, like she’s about to start doing the Dance of the Cuckolded Woodland Sprite, and I start laughing. She’s laughing, and I’m laughing, and I swear to Gods I’m the luckiest man in the world. I look at her, lit by fire, caked in blood, scored by the Shrieking of the Chorus and the wailing of a dying goat, and I wish I could marry her again. I wish I could marry her a hundred thousand times.

Carlos will clear the two cereal bowls, part of the brand-new set you bought when you moved here and on the way to the sink, he'll kiss you gently on the forehead, the very forehead that's been so gently kissed by so many men, a marker amid thousands in a graveyard of kisses

The weak breeze whispers nothing the water screams sublime. His feet shift, teeter-totter deep breaths, stand back, it’s time. Toes untouch the overpass soon he’s water-bound. Eyes locked shut but peek to see the view from halfway down. A little wind, a summer sun a river rich and regal. A flood of fond endorphins brings a calm that knows no equal. You’re flying now, you see things much more clear than from the ground. It's all okay, or it would be were you not now halfway down. Thrash to break from gravity what now could slow the drop? All I’d give for toes to touch the safety back at top. But this is it, the deed is done silence drowns the sound. Before I leaped I should've seen the view from halfway down. I really should’ve thought about the view from halfway down. I wish I could've known about the view from halfway down—

She'd climbed into his heart without thinking, the way that a kid idly tongues a loose tooth.

A person as unexceptional as Lucinda doesn't live a life as much as a life just floods in around her, filling up whatever empty space a life should be occupying.

I almost stayed. But I didn't.

The opposite of a dog can be a cat, or a different dog, or nothing at all, the absence of dog.

I don't even think about you,' he couldn't wait to tell her, just as soon as she called him back.

Perhaps the Sadness has friends, a family, and can’t just pick up and go.

Hope this isn’t one of those any-place-I-hang-my-hat-is-home-type situations where the Sadness hangs its hat on you.

I am never going to hurt you like that again.

To us, the future seemed an endless web of possibilities, like the many-branched line of the Long Island Rail Road.

Most important, though, is the unspoken understanding that both of you are people - weak, wounded, fragile, forgivable people doing the very best you can under the impossible circumstances that is day-to-day existence.

We hope you enjoy your visit! Maybe if things were different, maybe if one of you weren’t about to leave the city for good, you could come here again sometime. Maybe this could become something special, something bigger than just a thing you tried once because, hey, why not? But on the other hand, it’s probably best not to think about it too much. Just enjoy this for what it is. You’ve still got the boat ride back to Manhattan to look forward to, and if you load yourself up with too many might-have-beens, the ferry will sink under all that weight.

This will not be pleasant, this lunch, and you will both feel terrible afterward–it will not at all provide the closure either of you had hoped for–but if there's a silver lining here (and you're not sure there is one), it's the assurance that what you had, whatever it was, had weight. It made an impact. You can put to rest the fear that you were a blip in this other person's life, a footnote. What you did was important. You hurt somebody, and somebody hurt you.

ManMonster makes many noises, and part of my job as Companion to ManMonster is to decipher noises and discern meanings. At first I did not care to discern meanings of ManMonster noises, because why should I bother? I am creature with rich interior life; I should waste time trying to discern meanings of grunts and whines from ManMonster? But now I see that ManMonster is very unable to discern meanings of my noises, so if we are to understand each other at all, I am the one who must discern meanings, and since we live in same House, it is better for everyone if someone understands someone. So, fine. We are companions and I discern meanings.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Facebook, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through photo slideshows at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connections of their youth through the machinery of night, who clicking and poking and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural brightness of tiny screens floating across the tops of cities contemplating likes, who bared their brains to the network and saw who got pregnant and who got fat and who’s living the life best lived by posting Instagrams of themselves staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through newly cropped profile pics with radiant cool eyes obsessing over whose ex’s new lover is the best looking ex-lover’s lover, who breaking their backs falling out of ergonomic chairs while shouting into the icy streets, Everybody look how clever I am, Look how much fun I am having, Look at this amazing party I went to, Look at how well-liked I am, Look at my effortless carefully constructed casual desperate thrown together fun, Everybody look, This is fun, Look, Look, I swear to God I am having so much fun.

That the thing about death is that it’s terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when we’re confronted with death we can either be cowardly or we can be brave, but either way we’re going to die, so… ... And I thought about how, actually, if you wanted to, you could say the same thing about life. That life is terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when you’re confronted with life you can either be cowardly or you can be brave, but either way you’re going to live. So you might as well be brave.

I get the sense that some people think that influence dilutes – that the more you are someone else, the less you are yourself, as if you were born with some innate distinct youness that is gradually sanded away by the corroding forces of conformity. That if you could somehow tune everything else out and really dig deep within yourself, you’d find your voice there, pure and independent. That’s bullshit. Your voice isn’t there, already made. You need to make your own voice. You need to make your own voice.