Quotes About Smell

The sense of smell, which seems to diminish as we grow older, until it becomes something scarcely worthy of being called a sense, is nearly as keen in little children as in the inferior animals, and, when they live with nature, contributes as much to their pleasure as sight or hearing.

My dad got me a chemistry book one Christmas and I burnt the garden shed down. I remember there was the most beautiful smell forever after in the remains.

The nurses did their best to spruce up the antiseptic corridors but the smell of pine boughs was overpowered by Pine Sol and no one paused beneath the mistletoe on the contagious ward.

A computer does not smell ... if a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better… And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn't do that for you. I'm sorry.

Could she smell my breath? Could she hear my cursed circular heart beat revolving like the crime it is in my deathly chest?

I keep staring at the bag in Mrs. Parks's hand: yellows, greens, blues, whites, pastel colors so soft they look as if they have faded in the sea. The washed colors of the sea and sleep. Pajama colors. The colors of baby clothes. In my nose is the smell of my brothers' heads after they are born. Maybe this is why people making journeys buy saltwater taffy. It gives you the lovely dreamy sense that you can start all over again from the beginning.

The darkness was crisp, as though scraped of sight and smell by winter's razor.

She smells better, Claire said. And she made me cookies.

I can smell the crazy on that man from here. I have a nose for it.

It smelled like Lysol and desperation.

He was smothered by dread. Fear. A horrible sense of being hunted. And then one of the automaton lions turned its head toward him. The eyes shone red. Red like blood. Red like fire. They could smell it on him, the illegal book. Or maybe just his fear

The oubliette, I was not a mouse, I was a vampire, I was a blind vampire who would heal, of course, eventually, and see again. Stop, I told myself. I drew in a deep breath and smelled ancient death, crushed weeds, rotting metal, stone. I had no idea where the oubliette was located. I was simply at the bottom of it, standing in cold, filthy water and thinking that this time, my favorite slippers were well and truly ruined. Such a pity.

He'd grown so addicted to the feel of those books—the individual differences in the bindings, the leather or fabric covers, the weight of papers, the smell. They were a very different experience than these Blanks, which all felt so . . . sterile, somehow. Words that could be readily dismissed and replaced didn't have the same moral heft to them, to him

Children frighten me. I mean, I appreciate them on a cute aesthetic level, but they're very demanding and unreasonable creatures and often smell funny.

Roaming the streets of Manhattan on foot had always been one of my favorite ways to find inspiration. There's so much to see and smell (not all of it pleasant, except this time of year, which smells of roasted cashews, crisp air, and gingerbread lattes).

My guess was that when you descended to a certain depth of depravity, the Fogs could smell you as a hound, catching a murderer's spoor, could track the criminal through forest, field, and moor.

Depending on the breed, a canine's sense of smell is between ten thousand times and a hundred thousand times greater than ours.

In addition to the garlic, verbena aftershave, coconut-scented hand sanitizer, antiperspirant, ChapStick, pee on the shoes, anger, and hatred, Frank also smelled of the particular kind of fear that had a sour edge and was called cowardice

Everyone says, Come to your senses, and I do, of you. Every touch electric, every taste you, every smell, even burning sugar, every cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples at the farmers' market, every melon, plum, I come undone, undone.

Besides being a nasty habit that made her hair smell and stained her fingers, it was an expensive one.

I felt like a champion because I was figuring shit out. I was a doer and a getter-doner, and it was okay to be identified by the neighbors as the little lady who had a dump truck of manure delivered, a load that made the entire neighborhood smell like a dairy barn for weeks.

I'm sure we were all feeling blessed on this ferryboat among the humps of very green--in the sunlight almost coolly burning, like phosphorus--islands, and the water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God, despite the smell, the slight, dreamy suffocation, of some kind of petroleum-based compound used to seal the deck's seams.

What can be said about those fields? There were blackbirds circling above their own shadows, and beneath them the cows stood around smelling one another's butts.

I began to long, as I had before, for some special smell, some special music that would fill me, lift me up and carry me away, float me off the rocks of my body and sweep me into some wideness, some vast expanse of blue-grey nothingness.