"Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"Are You Ready for New Urban Fragrances?

Yeah, I guess I'm ready, but listen:

Perfume is a disguise. Since the middle ages, we have worn masks of fruit and flowers in order to conceal from ourselves the meaty essence of our humanity. We appreciate the sexual attractant of the rose, the ripeness of the orange, more than we honor our own ripe carnality.

Now today we want to perfume our cities, as well; to replace their stinging fumes of disturbed fossils' sleep with the scent of gardens and orchards. Yet, humans are not bees any more than they are blossoms. If we must pull an olfactory hood over our urban environment, let it be of a different nature.

I want to travel on a train that smells like snowflakes.

I want to sip in cafes that smell like comets.

Under the pressure of my step, I want the streets to emit the precise odor of a diamond necklace.

I want the newspapers I read to smell like the violins left in pawnshops by weeping hobos on Christmas Eve.

I want to carry luggage that reeks of the neurons in Einstein's brain.

I want a city's gases to smell like the golden belly hairs of the gods.

And when I gaze at a televised picture of the moon, I want to detect, from a distance of 239,000 miles, the aroma of fresh mozzarella."
— Tom Robbins (Wild Ducks Flying Backward)

"I wanted this day, the perfect buttery sun like peach ice cream, the speed, the satin leather of the car seat, the fair. Forbidden fruit, a day like no other. "
— Beth Gutcheon (More Than You Know: A Novel)

"As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour"
— William Gass

"Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

"One more organ or one less in our body would give us a different intelligence. In fact, all the established laws as to why our body is a certain way would be different if our body were not that way."
— Montesquieu

"Forget language. Afer all, it bores me. The senses. And this much is true: any communication must transcend the immediacy of solidarity, must be mediated by ideological and economic connections. And there the senses reappear. No use giving in to words."
— V Y Mudimbe

"A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impressions than an eighteenth-century artist"
— Fernand Leger