“He tasted passion. He tasted emotion. He tasted a world he’d never imagined, one he could never enter. It was right there in front of him, suddenly open to him. Unexpected. Exciting. Scary.”

“Because her general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take apart.”

“There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.”

“She asked him if he could teleport. (He could.) She asked him if he had superhuman strength. (He did.)She asked him if he enjoyed the taste of human blood. (He didn’t.) She asked him why he was always being depicted as having the head of a goat in the movies. (He wondered about that, too.)”

“The sight of these closed golden houses with their warmth of life awoke in him a bitter, poignant, strangely mixed emotion of exile and return, of loneliness and security, of being forever shut out from the palpable and passionate integument of life and fellowship, and of being so close to it that he could touch it with his hand, enter it by a door, possess it with a word--a word that, somehow, he could never speak, a door that, somehow, he would never open.”

“Like punch through the brick wall he’d built around himself and give in to the sudden, desperate urges to touch, to taste, to feel. Krista Fucking Slater. Of all the women in the world, why was she the only one who managed to remind him he was still alive in a way no one had been able to in three long years?”