“I read once about a kind of fungus that grows in trees. The fungus begins to encroach on the systems that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the branches. It disables them one by one―it crowds them out. Soon, the fungus―and only the fungus―is carrying the water, and the chemicals, and everything else the tree needs to survive. At the same time it is decaying the tree slowly from within, turning it minute by minute to rot.That is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.It is hard and deep and angular, a system of blockades. It is everything and total.”

“Caring about him was like trying to love a tree stump - a cold, mean-spirited paternalistic tree stump. With fungus.”

“I wouldn't say hate, exactly. You're kind of like fungus, Gwen. After a while, you just start growing on people.”

“Like special fungus, your love will grow in strange places”

“One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it - water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave wants to make you be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.”

“[Eric:] "I'm hoping that the more you see me, the more I'll grow on you."[Sookie:] "Like a fungus?”