Smells Quotes

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.”
― Umberto Eco

“The smells of Christmas are the smells of childhood”
― Richard Paul Evans, The Christmas Box

“It smells terrible in here.'

Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Okay," Annabeth said. "What exactly do you smell?"
"Something bad," Tyson answered.
"Great," Annabeth grumbled. "That clears it up.”
― Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters

“Wild honey smells of freedom
The dust - of sunlight
The mouth of a young girl, like a violet
But gold - smells of nothing.”
― Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems

“The fragrance of white tea is the feeling of existing in the mists that float over waters; the scent of peony is the scent of the absence of negativity: a lack of confusion, doubt, and darkness; to smell a rose is to teach your soul to skip; a nut and a wood together is a walk over fallen Autumn leaves; the touch of jasmine is a night's dream under the nomad's moon.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“My mother, who would always buy her books new, hated it the vintage hardcovers with their cracked spines and threadbare cloth covers. True you couldn't go in there and buy the latest best seller, but when you held one of those volumes in your hands, you were leafing through another person'a life. Someone else had once loved that story, too. Someone else had carried that book in a backpack, devoured it over breakfast, mopped up that coffee stain at a Paris café, cried herself to sleep after that last chapter. The scent was distinctive: a slight damp mildew, a punch of dust. To me, it was the smell of history.”
― Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

“...and so many orchards circled the village that on some crisp October afternoons the whole wold smelled like pie.”
― Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth

“It was six hours to Hosannah Beach and he didn't glance at the silver coin that Dad had given him, not even once. All the way he clutched it tight in the palm of his hand and fel the bevelled edge bite into his skin. [...] Waiting in the car while Yvonne unlocked the house, he brought his hand up to his face and opened it. His sweat had the bitter smell of hot metal, hot and bitter, this was what leaving home would always smell like.”
― Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

“Endless love and voluptuous appetite pervaded this stifling nave in which settled the ardent sap of the tropics. Renée was wrapped in the powerful bridals of the earth that gave birth to these dark growths, these colossal stamina; and the acrid birth-throes of this hotbed, of this forest growth, of this mass of vegetation aglow with the entrails that nourished it, surrounded her with disturbing odours. At her feet was the steaming tank, its tepid water thickened by the sap from the floating roots, enveloping her shoulders with a mantle of heavy vapours, forming a mist that warmed her skin like the touch of a hand moist with desire. Overhead she could smell the palm trees, whose tall leaves shook down their aroma. And more than the stifling heat, more than the brilliant light, more than the great dazzling flowers, like faces laughing or grimacing between the leaves, it was the odours that overwhelmed her. An indescribable perfume, potent, exciting, composed of a thousand different perfumes, hung about her; human exudation, the breath of women, the scent of hair; and breezes sweet and swooningly faint were blended with breezes coarse and pestilential, laden with poison. But amid this strange music of odours, the dominant melody that constantly returned, stifling the sweetness of the vanilla and the orchids' pungency, was the penetrating, sensual smell of flesh, the smell of lovemaking escaping in the early morning from the bedroom of newlyweds.”
― Émile Zola, La Curée

“Children would beg for a peppermint drop each time he walked into town, and they'd follow behind, asking for a second and a third. When he died suddenly, while working late at his office, every boy and girl in the village reported smelling mint in the night air, as if somehing sweet had passed them right by.”
― Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth

“I still dream in pictures and color, always the world of my childhood. I see the purple Judas trees at Easter lighting up the roadsides and terraces of the town. Ochre cliffs made of cinnamon powder. Autumn clouds rolling along the ground of the hills, and the patchwork of wet oak leaves on the grass. The shape of a rose petal. And my parents' faces, which will never grow any older.
"But it is strange how scent brings it all back too. I only have to smell certain aromas, and I am back in a certain place with a certain feeling."
The comforting past smelled of heliotrope and cherry and sweet almond biscuits: close-up smells, flowers you had to put your nose to as the sight faded from your eyes. The scents of that childhood past had already begun to slip away: Maman's apron with blotches of game stew; linen pressed with faded lavender; the sheep in the barn. The present, or what had so very recently been the present, was orange blossom infused with hope.”
― Deborah Lawrenson, The Sea Garden

“evening harmony

behold the times when trembling on their stems
the flowers evaporate like thuribles
the sounds and scents turn in the evening cool;
sad waltz, languid intoxication!

the flowers evaporate like thuribles
the viol quivers like a heart that's torn
sad waltz, languid intoxication!
the sky is sad like some memorial.

the viol quivers like a heart that's torn
a heart that hates the void perpetual!
the sky is sad like some memorial
the sun has drowned in it's vermillion

a heart that hates the void perpetual
recalls each glowing moment of times gone!
the sun has drowned in it's vermillion;

your memory shines my monstrance personal”
― Charles Baudelaire

“It rained in Hampshire yesterday, a soft autumn storm that brought down hardly any leaves. The dahlias are no longer in stem, and frost has withered the chrysanthemums, but the air smells divine, like old leaves and wet bark, and ripe apples. Have you ever noticed that each month has its own smell? May and October are the nicest-smelling months, in my opinion.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Love in the Afternoon

“The sight of my mother's handwriting on the slips of paper and in the margins of the book causes me to inhale sharply, and for a moment I smell licorice, as if the mere sight of her heavily styled penmanship has produced an olfactory hallucination. It's a delicate smell, more like anise or fresh tarragon than the sugary smell of a licorice pastille.
Smell, I remember my mother once telling me, is the most powerful of the senses. Without it, there is no taste. Long ago I lost the memory of her face, the sound of her voice, the touch of her fingers. But I can still remember her smell, in the aroma of a sherry reduction, the perfume, delicate and faint, that lingers on your hands after you've run them through a hedge of rosemary, the pungent assault of a Gauloises cigarette. Any of a thousand smells are enough to conjure her memory.”
― Meredith Mileti, Aftertaste: A Novel in Five Courses

“I could describe the way the smells of brine and sun have permeated every stone of every street, or the way the tide callers stand at their watchtowers and cry out the hour for their Cities. I could tell you of the many-shaped ships that crisscross the seas with careful writing stitched on their sails praying for good fortune and fair winds. I could tell you of the squid-ink tattoos that adorn the hands of every husband and wife, and of the lesser word-workers who prick words into flesh.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“My life in the kitchen began with my grandmother in the village of Champvert in the Tarn-et-Garonne department of southwestern France, the town so small you'd need a magnifying glass to find it on the map. I'd sit on a tall wooden stool, wide-eyed, watching Grand-mère Odette in her navy-blue dress and black ballerina flats, her apron adorned with les coquelicots (wild red poppies), mesmerized by the grace with which she danced around her kitchen, hypnotized by all the wonderful smells- the way the aromas were released from the herbs picked right from her garden as she chopped, becoming stronger as she set them in an olive oiled and buttered pan. She'd dip a spoon in a pot or slice up an onion in two seconds, making it look oh so easy, and for her it was. But my favorite part was when she'd let me taste whatever delight she was cooking up, sweet or savory. I'd close my eyes, lick my lips, and sigh with happiness.
Sometimes Grand-mère Odette would blindfold me, and it wasn't long before I could pick out every ingredient by smell. All the other senses came to me, too- sight (glorious plating), taste (the delight of the unknown), touch (the way a cherry felt in my hand), and hearing (the way garlic sizzled in the pan).”
― Samantha Verant, The Secret French Recipes of Sophie Valroux

“There must have been a billion leaves on the land; he waded in them, a dry river smelling of hot cloves and warm dust. And the other smells! There was a smell like a cut potato from all the land, raw and cold and white from having the moon on it most of the night. There was a smell like pickles from a bottle and a smell like parsley on the table at home. There was a faint yellow odour like mustard from a jar. There was a smell like carnations from the yard next door. He put down his hand and felt a weed rise up like a child brushing him. His fingers smelled of liquorice. He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“There was a smell like a cut potato from all the land, raw and cold and white from having the moon on it most of the night.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-color prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries.
This one smelled unlike any book I'd ever held. Cinnamon and coal smoke, catacombs and loam. Damp seaside evenings and sweat-slick noontimes between palm fronds. It smelled as if it had been in the mail for longer than any one parcel could be, circling the world for years and accumulating layers of smell like a tramp wearing too many clothes.
It smelled like adventure itself had been harvested in the wild, distilled to a fine wine, and splashed across each page.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“The air there was sticky and hot, filled with a strangely depressing odor—the smell of snow that had clung to the soles of people’s boots and had slowly melted in front of the fireplace.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“There’s this smell that only exists in
Milwaukee in October. The thin smoky jet of laundry after the rain. Wet leaves half-drying, half getting wet again. Open PBR cans,
cigarettes, leather. A mix of youth and nostalgia, of losing something
as you’re living it. The feeling, both terrifying and comforting, that life would always
be exactly like this.”
― Zhanna Slor

“The whole place smells like roasted peppers, cilantro, and lime-- a welcome scent to her hunger.”
― Jennifer Gold, The Ingredients of Us

“I took a deep breath and recalled every smell of my childhood: the cinnamon that dominated not only winter baking, but many of the tomato-based Italian dishes Mom loved; vanilla, always used as an undertone to her egg-based savories; and rosemary. When did she not use rosemary?”
― Katherine Reay, Lizzy and Jane

“The loss of love
smells like all the sweetness of life
slowly fades away.”
― Srinivas Mishra

“Sometimes. I've dated a few girls in the past, but I never liked how they smelled."

"You're not serious." I gawked at him.

Wolfgang, on the other hand, laughed. "Nah, he's so serious."

"But, but. You mean they smelled bad or something?”
― Avery Song, SSS: Year One

“If you have a patient with a condition that's not understood why not ascribe it to a disorder that is also not understood? Autism occurs in males more than it does in females. So does higher order mathematical intuition. We think: What is this about? Dont know. What is at the heart of it? Dont know. All I can tell you is that I like numbers. I like their shapes and their colors and their smells and the way they taste. And I dont like to take people's word for things.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“For me, who has been so much alone, it feels like drowning in a deluge of sights and sounds and smells.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“He lived in one room on the top floor of a shabby house. It was dirty and untidy, and it was filled with a pungent odour made up of many different stinks.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“The hospital corridor stretched out in front of me, endless and blank, but the smells told me everything – blood and love and fear, and covering it all, the sharp, fake odor of bleach and cleansers, a mask that kept slipping.”
― Erica Bauermeister, The Scent Keeper