“She walked over to my desk and pulled a page out of the typewriter. I didn't know what was happening. I still said nothing, but I could smell liquor on her breath, and then the very peculiar but distinctive odor of decay, sweetish and cloying, the odor of oldness, the odor of this woman in the process of growing old.”
Ask the Dust (1939)
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John Fante 113
1909–1983; American novelist, short story writer and screen… 1909–1983Related quotes

“There is nothing like an odor to stir memories.”
The Market
Context: "And what are those things at all?" demands my companion, diverted for a moment from the flowers. She nods towards a mass of dull-green affairs piled on mats or being lifted from big vans. She is a Cockney and displays surprise when she is told those things are bananas. She shrugs and turns again to the musk-roses, and forgets. But to me, as the harsh, penetrating odor of the green fruit cuts across the heavy perfume of the flowers, comes a picture of the farms in distant Colombia or perhaps Costa Rica. There is nothing like an odor to stir memories.

“[Her] perfume was delicate and at the same time with the hint of an odor like a tiger in ambush.”
Из художественных произведений
Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Under the Trees, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 494.