Raphael Bob-Waksberg

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.

She told him she loved him and cared about him, and he was so dizzy in love himself he didn’t realize she was breaking up with him.

Was ever a city so ruined by history, so smothered in the blood of past conflagration?

You imagine spending the rest of your life with this man, as you’ve imagined with all of them—not because you think you will necessarily, but just because you can’t help but wonder.

You imagine the kids you’ll have, the family vacations and anniversary dinners, the way you’ll help each other with the dishes, the way you’ll interrupt and editorialize each other’s stories and jokes, the way you’ll promise to never go to bed angry, even if that means—as it often will—staying up all night arguing.

felled by the same foolish blunder of knowing you a little too well and yet also somehow not enough.

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

you thought about your temporary cells and 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.

“But I don’t think that like being in relationships and having sex is necessarily the same thing as growing up, you know? Like ‘growing up’ can mean a lot of things.”

“Everyone who ever loves me one day outgrows me.”

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.