“That tastes like hope feels.”

“Everything tastes like pennies.”

“Doing stuff never feels as good as you hope it will feel.”

“a taste so profound and complex that it can't even be compared to other tastes, only to emotions. Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, tastes like love without the fear of love's dissolution.”

“So afterward, while I was getting eviscerated by chemo, for some reason I decided to feel really hopeful. Not about survival but I felt like Anna does in the book, that feeling of excitement and gratitude about just being able to marvel at it all.”

“Gus: "It tastes like..."Me: "Food."Gus: "Yes, precisely. It tastes like food, excellently prepared. But it does not taste, how do I put this delicately...?"Me: "It does not taste like God Himself cooked heaven into a series of five dishes which were then served to you accompanied by several luminous balls of fermented, bubbly plasma while actual and literal flower petals floated down around your canal-side dinner table."Gus: "Nicely phrased."Gus's father: "Our children are weird."My dad: "Nicely phrased.”

“What's the pleasure?' I asked.'Planning, I guess. I don't know. Doing stuff never feels as good as you hope it will feel.”