“The smell of the library was always the same – the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as "the steam of the social soup."”

“There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos.”

“This was a thing she’d not seen before, how the meat that fed her was a living being one minute and then violently dead. The smell of it was personal, inescapable, like the scent that rose in the steam from her own self when she stepped into a hot bath. They had broken open the animal’s secret body just to eat it.”

“And we will NOT let Campbell's Soup, Old Navy, or anybody ELSE, HAMMER into the minds of girls as YOUNG as SIX YEARS OLD that they should ALWAYS hate their bodies and ALWAYS be on a diet!”

“Like beauteous flowers which vainly waste their scent
Of odours in unhaunted deserts.”

“Of course it's alright for librarians to smell of drink.”

“On Matthew McConaughey: "He was always taking his shirt off, he's like "Yeah, here's my deal, I'm hot." We had a meeting one day at like 11 o'clock, right before the show and he walks into the meeting shirtless wearing this like old musty sarong… He doesn't smell great, no."”

“Librarians need to focus not on individual, physical libraries but on the larger networks–physical and digital–of which their libraries are part.”

“Europeans had sometimes invited him to dinner and given him stuffed aubergines and onion soup and Nuits St Georges and what they said was good coffee.…They had evinced, in their curious French mixed with Malay (both were foreign languages, both occupied the same compartment, they were bound to get mixed), a nostalgia for France which amused him slightly, bored him much, flattered him not at all.”

“The place was part museum, part library, and part archive; I loved it at first sight…and smell, for here there were thousands of printed books, many very old indeed, and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.”