Top 70 Raphael Bob-Waksberg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day – that’s the hard part. But it does get easier.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

4. “But what if this time you stayed?”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

5. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

7. “It’s not what we do that makes us who we are. It’s what we don’t do that defines us.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

8. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

9. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

10. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

11. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

12. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s awesome that you did that, but when’s the last time you did something that actually scared you?”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

13. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

14. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

15. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

17. “Something is lost and something is gained. Something is forgotten and something is found.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

18. “Lunch with the Person Who Dumped You.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

19. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

21. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

22. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

23. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

24. “Even that shared experience–it’s true significance anyway, what it really means–that belongs to you alone.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

25. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

26. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

27. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

28. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

29. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

31. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

32. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

34. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

35. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

36. “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?”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

37. “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?”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

38. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

39. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

40. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

43. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

44. “I am only as good as I am, and I could only do what the person as good as I am could do. A statue isn’t built from the ground up... 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... It’s not what we do that makes us who we are. It’s what we don’t do that defines us.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

45. “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?”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

46. “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.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

47. “She’d climbed in his heart without thinking, the way that a kid idly tongues a loose tooth.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

49. “If you load yourself up with too many might-have-beens, the ferry will sink under all that weight.”

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg