Quotes About Smell

I can always tell when my mother, an artist who grew up in Switzerland, starts to feel nostalgic for home. It is the smell of the crispy apple tarts, the ginger cookies, and the creamy muesli full of nuts and fresh berries. The scent alone delivers a rush of childhood memories for me.

If I were fully conscious of my surroundings at this moment, I would describe the light through the window, the way it searches out the apples in the glass bowl, buffing them to an unnatural sheen. I bought them for their fragrance, not their freshness, so even if you were to close your eyes, you'd know you were in the presence of apples. You would smell the heavy softening, the sweet rotting where apple ends and cider begins.

Sidda can't help herself. She just loves books. Loves the way they feel, the way they smell, loves the black letters marching across the white pages...

It still had that wonderful smell that old churches have: part damp, part old hymn books, and the lingering scent of burned-out candles.

Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like sheep, was the sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy's hearing aid, and when the sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a cup of coffee.

I love your smell, she said. I told her, "You don't love me. You love my microbiome.

Please, Percy...change your clothes. You smell like you've been run over by an electric horse.

In case you're wondering, the underside of a sheep doesn't smell that great. Imagine a winter sweater that's been dragged through the mud and left in the laundry hamper for a week. Something like that.

Okay, Annabeth said. What exactly do you smell? Something bad, Tyson answered. Great, Annabeth grumbled. That clears it up.

He'd gone from sixteen to seventy-five in a matter of seconds, but the old-man smell happened instantly, like boom. Congratulations! You stink!

Annabeth looked at me. We have to get out of here. You think I want to be in the girls' restroom? I mean the ship, Percy! We have to get off the ship. Smells bad, Tyson agreed. And dogs eat all the eggs. Annabeth is right. We must leave the restroom and the ship.

Mark my words, nothing smells worse than burned scorpion.

Next to her Percy coughed. This place smells like my ex-stepfather.

I smelled barbecue before I reached the house, and that made me madder than ever, because I really love barbecue.

I pictured my mom, alone in our little apartment on the Upper East Side. I tried to remember the smell of her blue waffles in the kitchen. It seemed so far away.

The convent smelled like every Catholic church Jackson had ever been inside—an excess of incense and Mansion House polish.

The room stank of boys. Louise imagined a girl's room would smell of nail varnish, pencils, cheap candy sweets. Archie's room was essence of testosterone and feet.

Yes, said Cook. That is soup that you are smelling. The princess, not that you would know or care, is missing, bless her goodhearted self. and times are terrible. and when times are terrible, soup is the answer. Don't it smell like the answer?

I said, What is that smell? A man's voice answered me. He said, That's cake, darling. I liked that answer very much. I think that cake is a very good word, in general, and that people should use it as answers to questions more often.

Beauty! Sid Morris said, addressing the dirty windows that looked out to the alley where, on certain Thursdays, the smell up from the Chinese restaurant across the street reached a point you could almost taste. Beauty! he said.

You see, nothing is more immediate, more complete than the sense of smell. In an instant, it has the power to transport you. Your olfactory sense connects not to the memory itself, but to the emotion you felt when that memory was made. To recreate a scent memory is one of the most challenging, eloquent pursuits possible. It's poetry, in its most immediate form.

So do all animals react that way to you? I know you said rats steer clear. Most do. They see a human, but they smell someting else. It confuses them. Canines are the worst, though. He paused. No, cats are the worst. I really don't like cats. I laughed.

I could really use that dinner." He plucked the front of his sweat-soaked shirt. "I should have a shower and change. Guess I wasn't thinking this through too well." He glanced toward the house, and I knew he wasn't eager to go in. For the same reason he'd been out here boxing. "You'll dry," I said. "And if the smell doesn't fade, I'll just sit at another table. Now come on before I starve.

There was a difference between art, which you just looked at, and things like soap, which you used. Even if the soap smelled so good that you didn't want to use it, only smell it. This was why people got so pissed off about art. Because you didn't eat it, and you didn't sleep on it, and you couldn't put it up your nose. A lot of people said things like That's not art when whatever they were talking about could clearly not have been anything else, except art.