“When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.”

“A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.”

“Ben starts. "I Spy with my little eye something I really like.""Oh I know," Radar says. "It's the taste of balls.""No.""Is it the taste of penises?" I guess."No, dumbass.""Hmm," says Radar. "Is it the smell of balls?""The texture of balls?”

“I'm not saying it'll be easy. It will probably be really hard. Between my parents, and the distance between us, it'll be really hard. But...sometimes it's worth it. To have someone there. And I felt like...like we worked together. Today. It felt right. And I might be full of crap but I do know one thing: I know how to love.”

“I want to tell her not to speak, want to say it, but her lips are on mine again and I taste me and I taste her and I don't taste what we're saying and I don't taste Noah. I taste Camus—I owe to such evenings the idea I have of innocence.”

“I drink coffee sometimes, but Starbucks’ coffee tastes like burnt ass,” I say.“Actually, it tastes nothing like burnt ass, Anna.”“And how would you know what burnt ass tastes like?”He laughs. “That’s for me to know…and you to find out.”I’m not sure I want to find out, but whatever.”