Quotes About Sensory

English, with its heavy stresses and wobbly intonation, was dirty and repugnant to his ears

The world lit up like a silent photograph, flat and grainy, limning the tree stark as a charcoal slash against a parchment sky. Lightning exploded like bluewhite cats-o'-nine-tails until sound rolled and cracked and splintered and Marghe could no longer tell if it was the ground shaking or her muscles; she felt deaf and blind and exposed to her core.

For Leifen, a thing is beautiful if she can reach out and put her hand on it any time.

I love to feel the sun rub against my pale northern skin, love its fingers reaching down into muscle and bone.

It was snowing. Her suit warmed rapidly, and the starvision visor turned the world smoky gray, ethereal, with the snow drifting down in black flakes. The grass was frozen, but she could not hear the crunch of her footsteps: all sound, all vision, all sensation was filtered by her suit. She was isolated from the world, just as though this were one of her first virtual-reality training missions as a cadet.

I could feel the open air, taste salt on the breeze.

I studied her, one bare foot tucked underneath her, the other swinging back and forth, and remembered the scent of sleepy, naked woman.

Moisture from the camera trickled down her neck, as far as the collarbones, which rose and fell, rose and fell. I wondered if the water would still be cool or whether it would have warmed running down her skin.

Her knuckles smelled of garlic and, faintly, that sleepy, buttery-toast scent my brain was already beginning to recognize.

The dogwood blossom was gone, azaleas in full bloom, and the air cupped my cheek as softly as a woman's hand.

The air was humid, so thick with moisture that she felt it like spider-webs across her face and kept wanting to hush it away, wipe it from her skin.

He looked so small and wounded in his bright jacket that I opened my arms and pulled him in. He wrapped his hands around my hips, leaned his forehead on my breastbone and wept. He smelled of woodsmoke and tea.

She breathed in and out, in and out. He breathed as fast as she did. She felt the muscles sliding over his ribs. He smelt of thyme and mead and that iron-and-salt tang that made her nostrils flare.

Hild, on the first boat with Eorpald and Edwin, smelt it before she saw it: the old, cold scent of deep, turned dirt; the smell of bones.

Onnen liked Mulstan, Hild could tell. She also knew Onnen liked the way he ran his holdings, though it lacked the fine and sharp efficiency a woman would bring to the housebold. She liked his daughter and his servants and the ease his housefolk felt in the hall. And she leaned in towards him as though she liked his smell. And Mulstan liked her; Hild saw the way his nostrils flared as Onnen laughed at something he said and patted his arm.

Peretur had never seen so many beasts living in so small a space; even closed, if she shut her eyes she could hear them, feel them, taste their curiosity.

For a moment my face hung near the opening of her robe, and I breathed in the soft, buttered-toast scent of sleepy, naked woman.

Everything tasted round and ripe. The air was as rich and sweet as cider. Just breathing fed some part of her.

Sometimes I used my fingers, digging down into the rich dirt, feeling it push under my nails. No doubt I'd regret it later, but it was good to feel so much life under my hands.

I wandered, paying no particular attention, just absorbing the city through the soles of my shoes and the taste on my tongue.

She could smell herself: rich, sleek, ready.

Her hand felt good in Peretur's, warm, more than warm.

She closed her eyes, willing her vision to rise from the blood-spattered green mountainside.

It was like being inside a lyre, inside a drum, inside a pipe. Hild thought her head might burst.