Quotes About Sensory

Man is thus surrounded by a supersensible universe of which he knows nothing because the centers of sense perception within himself have not been developed sufficiently to respond to the subtler rates of vibration of which that universe is composed.

His aura was too bright and his masculine force affected me physically," Angelou recalled years later. ?A hot desert storm eddied around him and rushed to me, making my skin contract, and my pores slam shut. . . . His hair was the color of burning embers and his eyes pierced.

it enhances the mixture of presence and escape that constitutes his "ecstasies,

It was a sensory phantasmagoria. The coldness of the setting moon, the warmth of the rising sun, and the sky above an explosion of pinks, yellows, and reds. From behind, Tessa felt Skylar scoop up her hair and lift it away from her neck. He pressed his lips to her exposed skin and she trembled, his touch rushing through every nerve in her body. Then she heard him whisper softly, "I'm still here, Tess.

Tessa didn't realize she was crying until she tasted tears on her lips. He's here. Watching me. Trying to touch me. So why can't I see him? Or hear him?

Alice had a rare gift: she was a "nose." Her sense of smell was so acute that she could distinguish and memorize the slightest odor. She spent her days alone, bent over the long wooden table in her flat, blending different essences to obtain combinations that might one day become a perfume. Every month she made the rounds of the London perfume shops, offering them her new creations.

Once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me… immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.

So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.

An hour is not merely an hour; it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

the warm glazes, the sparkling penumbra of the room itself and, through the little window framed with honeysuckle, in the rustic avenue, the resilient dryness of the sun-parched earth, veiled only by the diaphanous gauze woven of distance and the shade of the trees.

Ma quando di un lontano passato non rimane più nulla, dopo la morte delle creature, dopo la distruzione delle cose, soli e più fragili ma più vivaci, più immateriali, più persistenti, più fedeli, l'odore e il sapore permangono ancora a lungo, come anime, a ricordare, ad attendere, a sperare, sulla rovina di tutto, a sorreggere senza tremare - loro, goccioline quasi impalpabili - l'immenso edificio del ricordo.

When I saw any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form; for it would volatilise itself in some way before I could touch it, just as an incandescent body which is moved towards something wet never actually touches moisture, since it is always preceded, itself, by a zone of evaporation.

Porque la mejor parte de nuestra memoria está fuera de nosotros, en una brisa húmeda de lluvia, en el olor cerrado de un cuarto o en el perfume de una primera llamarada: allí dondequiera que encontremos esa parte de nosotros mismos de que no dispuso, que desdeñó nuestra inteligencia, esa postrera reserva del pasado, la mejor, la que nos hace llorar una vez más cuando parecía agotado todo el llanto.

Yet a single sound, a single scent, already heard or breathed long ago, may once again, both in the present and the past, be real without being present, ideal without being abstract, as soon as the permanent and habitually hidden essence of things is liberated, and our true self, which may sometimes have seemed to be long dead, but never was entirely, is re-awoken and re-animated when it receives the heavenly food that is brought to it.

What had to move - a leaf of the chestnut tree, for instance - moved.

And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke.

the cooing of pigeons, nesting in the wall outside; shimmering and unexpected like a first hyacinth gently tearing open its nutritious heart to release its flower of sound, mauve and satin-soft, letting into my still dark and shuttered bedroom as through an opened window the warmth, the brightness, the fatigue of a first fine day.

That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again.

What most enraptured me were the asparagus.

as though one's life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) tonality — this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon.

Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would sound two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour which I had not heard strike; something which had taken place had not taken place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence.

Which drew from Bloch nothing more instructive than "Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them." "My

That girl whom I never saw save dappled with the shadows of their leaves, was to me herself a plant of local growth, only taller than the rest, and one whose structure would enable me to approach more closely than in them to the intimate savour of the land from which she had sprung.