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Quotes About Smell

New-car smell is toxic to humans.
~ John Lloyd
My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.
~ Curtis Sittenfeld
I just love being around the animals. I enjoy their company, which probably sounds crazy, but I do. I particularly love their smell." "So do I," she said. "It's one of the great smells, actually, and traces of it are used in perfumes. It's called an animalic note." "Gosh," said Chum, "I wouldn't mind some of that. What's it called- Eau de Nag?" "Well, it's more of a hint deep inside a very complex blend of different smells, although one niche company does make a perfume called Stable.
~ Unknown
I looked at dozens of apartments and when I entered the hallway of the one I moved into next I knew I could live there because it was cheap and the hallway was baby blue. My friends all told me it smelled as bad there as it did in the last one but I found a heads-up penny on the threshold
~ Maggie Nelson
And there is a soreness to her body, it aches, her head feels softened, muzzy. She has acquired a disturbingly acute sense of smell. The odour of print from a magazine someone is reading across a room can oppress her. She knows what will be on their plates at lunch just from sniffing the air. She can walk down the middle of the ward and can tell who has bathed this week and who has not.
~ Maggie O'Farrell
As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air.
~ Maggie Stiefvater
What is important is not whether an essence smells beautiful on its own but how its idiosyncratic capacities and elements merge and blend with chosen others to create a beautiful new smell. For a perfumer to dislike patchouli or vetiver is like a painter disliking green or yellow. Essences are simply materials with which to realize a vision, and while every perfumer will have favorites, every essence has a place in skilled hands.
~ Mandy Aftel
What a psalm the storm was singing, and how fresh the smell of the washed earth and leaves, and how sweet the still small voices of the storm!
~ John Muir
Lucas rode up to Kidd's floor in a freight elevator that smelled of oranges and bananas and paint and maybe oil, walked down the hall and knocked on Kidd's hand-carved walnut door, which Kidd said he'd copied from some Gauguin carvings. Lucas wouldn't have known a Gauguin carving if one had bit him on the ass, so when told about it, he'd just said, "Hey, that's great," and felt like an idiot.
~ John Sandford
The breeze smelled like the breath of an old man with bad teeth.
~ John Sandford
Enzo showed a flair for words early and wrote his first story when he was seven, entitled The horrible sock that smelled bad and ate Pomona Falls except for my house, in which a large sock, mutated by its own horrible unwashed smell, started eating its way through the contents of an entire town and was thwarted only when the heroes Enzo and Magdy first punched it into submission and then threw it into a swimming pool filled with laundry soap.
~ John Scalzi
Describe the smell to me." "Are you serious right now?" "Yes, I want to know." "It's like a family of raccoons hotboxed themselves to death in a dumpster, and someone distilled their fermented remains." "Huh," Satie said. "I usually just say it smells like Malört, but I like your version, too.
~ John Scalzi
The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature. It was very far inland that I caught the first smell of the Pacific. When one has been long at sea, the smell of land reaches far out to greet one. And the same it true when one has been long inland.
~ John Steinbeck
Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.
~ John Updike
I have smelled some very famous and undoubtedly sexy boys. And sometimes, as cute as they are, I'd rather have them as a friend - just because of the way they smell!
~ Rachel Nichols
It was a musty sweet smell. "Is this plague city?
~ Unknown
I've read that it's the smell some carnivores use to find their prey. Imagine the trembling victim trying to hide, but knowing that the smell of its own fear will kill it.
~ Jo Nesbo
America is such a nation of suppressed emotion, and when you arrive in L.A., you can smell the fear. It's the most alien country I've ever been to.
~ Helen McCrory
That hateful staircase, up which I always passed with such dismay, gave out a smell of varnish which had to some extent absorbed, made definite and fixed the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even more cruel to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it.
~ Marcel Proust
The room smelled of children, that sunlight smell over socks and sweat.
~ Marcus Sakey
A courteous samurai, his father said, would wash his hair before battle so if his head was taken it would smell sweet for his enemy.
~ Unknown
Naif felt his tentacle caress her again, This time, though, he was holding something as well. It was rough hessian and the smell from it was putrid, like something dead a few days. She tried to push him away but his tentacle ws strong and persistent, not withdrawing until he'd wiped the cloth over her.
~ Unknown
The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight
~ M. F. K. Fisher
The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways.
~ T. S. Eliot