Smell Quotes - Page 15

• It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moonflower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves. ... I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails.

  Janet Fitch

  Beach, Art, Flower

  16 Copy quote

• There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell.

  Haruki Murakami

  Funeral, Dying, Way

  33 Copy quote

• Books, books, books in all their aspects, in form and spirit, their physical selves and what reading releases from their hieroglyphic pages, in their sight and smell, in their touch and feel to the questing hand, and in the intellectual music which they sing to the thoughtful brain and loving heart, books are to me the best of all symbols, the realest of all reality.

  Lawrence Clark Powell

  Book, Reading, Heart

  Lawrence Clark Powell (1985). “Books are basic: the essential Lawrence Clark Powell”, Univ of Arizona Pr

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fish and visitors stink in three days.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Lakes, Sea, Fishing

  Benjamin Franklin, Bessie W. Johns (comp) (1942). “Poor Richard comes to Life”

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• This morning, Tegus welcomed me again with an arm clasp and cheek touch. I wasn't startled this time, and I breathed in at his neck. How can I describe the scent of his skin? He smells something like cinnamon-- brown and dry and sweet and warm. Ancestors, is it wrong for me to imagine laying my head on his chest and closing my eyes and breathing in his smell?

  Shannon Hale

  Sweet, Morning, Eye

  4 Copy quote

• works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.

  Rebecca West

  Art, Wall, Doors

  7 Copy quote

• Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship. I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies. You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.

  Pat Conroy

  Ocean, Mountain Ranges, Sight

  Pat Conroy (2010). “The Lords of Discipline: A Novel”, p.21, Open Road Media

  146 Copy quote

  Show source

• I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

  W. H. Auden

  Blood, Eras, Madmen

  11 Copy quote

• You smell of other peoples blood, ma petite. It was no one you know. -Jean Claude and Anita

  Laurell K. Hamilton

  Blood, Knows, Petite

  9 Copy quote

• When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.

  Haruki Murakami

  Book, Breathing, Special

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Sep 08, 2014

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• A black cat among roses, phlox, lilac-misted under a quarter moon, the sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still. It is dazed with moonlight, contented with perfume.

  Amy Lowell

  Sweet, Cat, Moon

  Amy Lowell (2010). “Che ore sono?: poesie”, p.133, G. D'Ambrosio Angelillo

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• my mind is a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and taste and smell and hearing and sight keep hitting and chipping with sharp fatal tools in an agony of sensual chisels i perform squirms of chrome and ex -ecute strides of cobalt nevertheless i feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am becoming something a little different, in fact myself hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet bellowings

  e. e. cummings

  Taste And Smell, Sight, Agony

  8 Copy quote

• Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.

  W. H. Auden

  Sight, People, Handwriting

  23 Copy quote

• “This is hurting me a lot more than it’s hurting you,” he said. It was his standard line, but I knew that this time he was right. Worse than the boil was the stuff that came out of it. What got to me, and got to him even worse, was the stench, which was unbearable, and unlike anything I had come across before. It was, I thought, what evil must smell like - not an evil person but the wicked ideas that have made him that way. How could a person continue to live with something so rotten inside? And so much of it!

  David Sedaris

  Hurt, Ideas, Evil

  "Old Faithful" by David Sedaris, www.newyorker.com. November 29, 2004.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.

  Diane Setterfield

  Book, Dry, Taste

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.26, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The air was stifling, but he liked it because it was stifling city air, full of excitingly unpleasant smells, dangerous music, and the distant sound of warring police tribes.

  Douglas Adams

  Air, Cities, Police

  Douglas Adams (2012). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five”, p.492, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You know what it is you smell on him, Haven? Testosterone. It's leaking out of his pores.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Testosterone, Havens, Knows

  Lisa Kleypas (2015). “The Travis Family Series, Books 1-3: Blue-Eyed Devil, Smooth Taking Stranger and Sugar Daddy”, p.81, St. Martin's Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It was very pleasant to savor its aroma, for smells have the power to evoke the past, bringing back sounds and even other smells that have no match in the present. -Tita

  Laura Esquivel

  Past, Sound, Aroma

  30 Copy quote

• Because I want every breath you take to be empty unless you're close enough to smell me. Every word you speak to be unimportant unless it's to me. Every sound you hear empty unless it's my voice. I want you to remember that whatever pleasure you have from now on, you'll have it from me. ~Rurik Wilder~

  Christina Dodd

  Voice, Sound, Words You Speak

  Christina Dodd (2007). “Touch of Darkness: Darkness Chosen”, p.91, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.

  Graham Greene

  Love You, Dark, Light

  25 Copy quote

• You stay out here a little while, an' if you smell any roses, you come let me smell, too.

  John Steinbeck

  Rose, Littles, Let Me

  John Steinbeck (2016). “The Grapes of Wrath”, p.197, Hamilton Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Violence up close has a smell. Like copper blood and charcoal burning.

  Jodi Picoult

  Blood, Burning, Violence

  7 Copy quote

• For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Grief, Reflection, Blood

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2014). “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, p.16, Penguin UK

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• The sun glistened on a drop of water as it fell from his hand to his knee. David wiped it off, but it left no tidemark: there was no more dirt to rub away. He took a deep breath and shivered. He was David. Everything else was washed away, the camp, its smell, its touch--and now he was David, his own master, free--free as long as he could remain so.

  Anne Holm

  Hands, Water, Long

  8 Copy quote

• Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Sex, Animal, Men

  6 Copy quote