Quotes about scent

A collection of quotes on the topic of scent, likeness, smell, flowers.

Quotes about scent

“196. "Look on the bright side, suicide
Lost eyesight I'm on your side
Angel left wing, right wing, broken wing
Lack of iron and/or sleeping
Protector of the kennel
Ecto-plasma, Ecto-skeletal
Obituary birthday
Your scent is still here in my place of recovery!" ~”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

Angels, Birthday, Suicide, Sleep

“After a year and half Mamu told me if you see anything don’t talk about it. One night I was playing deep in meditation. I smelled something. It was an indescribable scent, something like sandalwood and jasmine. I thought it was the aroma of Ganges but the scent got more powerful. When I opened my eyes, there was Balaji standing right next to me, exactly as he is pictured. My door was locked from inside; nobody was allowed to enter when I did riyaz.”

Bismillah Khan (1916–2006) Indian musician

He said ‘play my son’ but I was sweating. I stopped playing.
Khan used to do riyaz (practice) before the temple of Balaji as advised by his mamu (maternal uncle) who had also told him not talk to any body about anything that might happen. But when he told his mamu about his seeing Balaji, mamu was annoyed and slapped him.
Quote, Power Profiles

Night

“The highest fragrance, the scent of musk, is taken from the mucus of a gazelle.”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic

“Wind howled throught the night, carrying the scent that would change the world.”

Christopher Paolini book Eragon

Source: Eragon

World, Change, Night

“Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Love, Tear, Victory

“We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The First Circle

Source: The First Circle

Sense

“When I see the children of the martyrs, I want to smell their scent, and I lose myself.”

Qasem Soleimani (1957–2020) Iranian senior military officer

Quoted in Dexter Filkins (30 September 2013). "The Shadow Commander" http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/09/30/130930fa_fact_filkins?currentPage=all. The New Yorker.

Children

“You look at me, you look at me closely, each time closer and then we play cyclops, we look at each other closer each time and our eyes grow, they grow closer, they overlap and the cyclops look at each other, breathing confusion, their mouths find each other and fight warmly, biting with their lips, resting their tongues lightly on their teeth, playing in their caverns where the heavy air comes and goes with the scent of an old perfume and silence. Then my hands want to hide in your hair, slowly stroke the depth of your hair while we kiss with mouths full of flowers or fish, of living movements, of dark fragrance. And if we bite each other, the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a short and terrible surge of breath, that instant death is beauty. And there is a single saliva and a single flavour of ripe fruit, and I can feel you shiver against me like a moon on the water.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Death, Pain, Beauty, Feeling

“There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

Books

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Flowers, Tree, Light, Summer

“I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Books, Reading

“I was running from my own thoughts as much as anything. I simply wanted to untangle myself from the web I had touched. A single, sticky, quivering strand of it was all I needed to warn me away. I did not want to think about people. I wanted the trees, the scents and colors, the shifting shadows of the wood, which spoke a language I understood. I wished I could simply disappear in it, live like a bird or a fox through the winter, and leave the things I had glimpsed to resolve themselves without me.”

Patricia A. McKillip book Winter Rose

Source: Winter Rose (1996), Chapter 5, pp. 42-43.

People, Color, Bird, Thinking

“Oh! human stupidity, do you not perceive that, though you have been with yourself all your life, you are not yet aware of the thing you possess most of, that is of your folly? and then, with the crowd of sophists, you deceive yourselves and others, despising the mathematical sciences, in which truth dwells and the knowledge of the things included in them. And then you occupy yourself with miracles, and write that you possess information of those things of which the human mind is incapable and which cannot be proved by any instance from nature. And you fancy you have wrought miracles when you spoil a work of some speculative mind, and do not perceive that you are falling into the same error as that of a man who strips a tree of the ornament of its branches covered with leaves mingled with the scented blossoms or fruit.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

Life, Truth, Stupidity, Error

“Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste,” at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the scent of those things which are most worth knowing, the great and the important insights.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 43

Thinking, Science

“Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

Death, Beauty

“He had preserved the best part of her and made it his own: the principle of her scent.”

Patrick Süskind (1949) German writer and screenwriter

Source: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Parting

“They're on their way to the foreign-language wing. That's no surprise. The foreign kids are always here, like they need to breathe air scented with their native language a couple times a day or they'll choke to death on too much American.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Death, Way, Time

“She's like snow in Russian," said Anna. "Snow in the evening when the sun sets and it looks like Alpengluhen, you know? And if snow had a scent it would smell like that [the rose]….”

Eva Ibbotson book A Countess Below Stairs

Source: A Countess Below Stairs

Sun

“That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Bean Trees

Source: The Bean Trees

Feeling, Strong, Personality

“I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.”

Jodi Picoult book Keeping Faith

Variant: simply-quotes Follow

I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.
Source: Keeping Faith

Thinking

“What is the scent of water?"
"Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew.”

Elizabeth Goudge (1900–1984) English fiction writer

Source: The Scent of Water

God, Water

“I don't care what your nose says! The last time you smelled half-blood, it turned out to be a meatloaf sandwich!"
"Meatloaf sandwiches are good! But this is a half-blood scent, I swear. They are on board!"
"Bah, your brain isn't on board!”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

Time

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Love, Fate

“People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile.”

Adriana Trigiani (1970) American film director

Source: Big Stone Gap

People, Memory, Childhood, Housing

“The atmosphere of the place soothed her automatically; the rich lantern lights, the sheer scent of paper and leather, and the fact that everywhere she looked, there were books, books, beautiful books.”

Genevieve Cogman (1972) novelist and game designer

Source: The Invisible Library

Books, Beauty, Light

“In pale moonlight / the wisteria's scent / comes from far away.”

Yosa Buson (1716–1783) poet from Japan

“She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Source: NOS4A2

Books, History, Time

“He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.”

Patrick Süskind (1949) German writer and screenwriter

Source: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Men, Heart

“When we read, it is not ours to absorb all that is written. Our thoughts are jealous and they constantly blank out the thoughts of others, for there is not room enough in us for two scents at one time.”

Milorad Pavić (1929–2009) Serbian writer

Source: Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words

Time, Reading

“The sweatshirt was big on her and she looked ridiculous. He liked it. And he liked that she was wearing something that carried his scent.”

Anne Bishop book Written in Red

Source: Written in Red

“… if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of Confidence. Either that or a scented candle.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Variant: You're gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle
Source: One Day

Life, Confidence

“I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Life, God, Religion, Drawing

“In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home.
It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard.
I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

Home, Spring

“The scent is sweet and meloncholy. A bit like dying, a bit like falling in love.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Elsewhere

Source: Elsewhere

Love

“A black cat among roses,
phlox, lilac-misted under a quarter moon,
the sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still.
It is dazed with moonlight,
contented with perfume…”

Amy Lowell (1874–1925) US writer

Cats, Night

“Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.”

Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth

Source: The House of Mirth

“I'll believe it if I see it" for dogs translates to "I'll believe it if I smell it." So don't bother yelling at them; it's the energy and scent they pay attention to, not your words.”

Cesar Millan (1969) Mexican - American dog trainer and television personality

Dogs

“Grief was like that. It gradually faded into a dull ache, until some simple sight or sound or scent hit him like a hammer blow.”

Cinda Williams Chima (1952) Novelist

Source: The Exiled Queen

“Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

Love, Death, Sadness, Beauty

“You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.”

Thomas Moore Irish Melodies

Farewell! But Whenever You Welcome the Hour, st. 3. <br class="br">Source: Irish Melodies http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/moore.html (1807–1834)

“I want my room to smell just like this." Iggy inhaled deeply as the scents flame-broiled burgers and hot french fries wafted around us.
'it would be an improvement.' I agreed.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

“Scent:
When she wore the hat, even many years later, she could always smell her mother's perfume & it was hard to remember she was supposed to be alone.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

“The only thing that gets me high is the musky scent of my enemy's fear”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

Fear

“When Jace opened the greenhouse door, the scent hit Clary, soft as the padded blow of a cat's paw…”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Cats

“The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Code of the Woosters

Source: The Code of the Woosters

Light, Tea, Housing, Country

“If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter and bread with only the scent of jam spread on top of it. It was the best time of her life.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Love, Life, Feeling, Laughter

“Adrian: Do you smell that?"
Sydney: “I smell the paint, and… wait… is that pine?”
Adrian: “Damn straight. Pine-scented cleaner. As in, I cleaned. With these hands, these hands that don’t do manual labor.”

Richelle Mead Bloodlines

Source: Bloodlines

Waiting, Painting

“That scent she threw off was not anything by Chanel. Unless they’d recently added a Tragedy line.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Reborn

“There was a time when you would have taken my heart with stake or gun. Now you have taken it with these delicate hands and the scent of your body."
- Jean-Claude”

Laurell K. Hamilton book The Killing Dance

Source: The Killing Dance

Time, Heart

“Could I but lay my head in your lap, lass. Feel your hand on me, and sleep wi' the scent of you in my bed.

Christ, Sassenach. I need ye.”

Diana Gabaldon book The Scottish Prisoner

Source: The Scottish Prisoner

Feeling, Sleep, Christ

“Iggy: "I'll grab a zebra; Gaz, you fill all the bubbles with your trademark scent. so people are choking and gagging; and let's throw beef jerky in their eyes! Now, that's a plan!”

James Patterson (1947) American author

People

“Something with inner beauty will live forever, like the scent of a rose.”

Alex Flinn book Beastly

Source: Beastly

Beauty, Beauty

“This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.”

Barbara Kingsolver book Prodigal Summer

Source: Prodigal Summer

Love

“Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Well-content,
Thou knowest of no strange continent;
Thou hast not felt thy bosom keep
A gentle motion with the deep;
Thou hast not sailed in Indian seas,
Where scent comes forth in every breeze.”

William Henry Davies (1871–1940) British poet

Sweet Stay-at-Home.

Home, Sea

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

William Chamberlayne (poet)

Pharonida (1659), Part II, Book IV.

Flowers

“"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

First lines part 1, chapter 1
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Mood, Heart, Summer

“"I know you," he said. "I know your scent. Long ago, yes, but I never forget. I know your name."
"A friend of a friend, perhaps?" I eyed his spear-tip nervously. Unlike Eagle-beak, he didn't wave it about at all.
"No… an enemy…"
"Terrible when you can't remember something that's right on the tip of your tongue," I observed. "Isn't it, though? And you try so hard to recall it, but often as not you can't because some fool's interrupting you, prattling away so you can't concentrate, and-"
Bull-head gave a bellow of rage. "Shut up! I almost had it then!"”

Jonathan Stroud book The Amulet of Samarkand

The Amulet of Samarkand (2003)

Fools, Rage, Forgetting

“The problem is that sex is the most dangerous way of trying to achieve personal growth, because the life force has mixed it so liberally with a string sense of "magic", which, in the attempt at possession turns out to be an illusion. The attempt to possess a woman through an act of sex is as frustrating as trying to possess the scent of a rose by cooking and eating it.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Corpse Garden (1998), p. 250

Life, Sex, Way, Problem

“I think there is a spiritual scent in us which feels mischief coming, as they say birds scent storms.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Letter IX
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Feeling, Bird, Thinking

“Did you know orchids
employ trickery to attract insects?
They spray a deceptive scent
resembling insect pheromones.
Bad flower! Bad flower!
Liar! Liar! Petals on fire!”

Sheri-D Wilson (1958) Canadian Spoken Word Poet

"Heart"
Goddess Gone Fishing for a Map of the Universe (2012)

Flowers

“Like the dawn upon a dream
Slowly through the scented gloom
Crept once more the ruddy gleam
O'er the friendly nursery room.
There, before our waking eyes,
Large and ghostly, white and dim,
Dreamed the Flower that never dies,
Opening wide its rosy rim.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Part IV : The End of the Quest
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), The Flower of Old Japan

Dreams, Flowers

“Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song, and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

as cited in History, Humanity and Evolution (1989), p. 383.
1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)

Truth, Nature, Sun

“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.”

Nalo Hopkinson book Midnight Robber

Section 2 (p. 104)
Midnight Robber (2000)

Secret, Animals, Personality, Dead

“It was a still afternoon — the golden light was lingering languidly among the upper boughs, only glancing down here and there on the purple pathway and its edge of faintly sprinkled moss: an afternoon in which destiny disguises her cold awful face behind a hazy radiant veil, encloses us in warm downy wings, and poisons us with violet-scented breath.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

Light

“Our eternity is not real; it resembles us; it is our own invention; its scent is vanity.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

“Eternity and Eternity,” p. 32
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “Skywalking”

“Why are women wearing perfumes that smell like flowers to attract men? Men don't like flowers. I have a great idea for a scent that will attract men — how about "New Car Interior?"”

Rita Rudner (1953) American comedian

Essay 16: "Flirting with Success", p. 61
Naked Beneath My Clothes (1992)

Women, Men, Cars, Flowers

“How full and rich a world
Theirs to inhabit is—
Sweet scent of grass and bloom,
Playmates’ glad symphony,
Cool touch of western wind,
Sunshine’s divine caress.

How should they know or feel
They are in darkness?

But, oh, the miracle!
If a Redeemer came,
Laid finger on their eyes—
One touch and what a world,
New-born in loveliness!”

Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) British writer

Poem: Blind Children

World, Feeling, Grass

“Let first the onion flourish there,
Rose among roots, the maiden-fair,
Wine-scented and poetic soul
Of the capacious salad bowl.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Underwoods

Bk. I, To a Gardener.
Underwoods (1887)

Soul, Wine

“O Love, divine Love, why do You lay siege to me?
In a frenzy of love for me, You find no rest.
From five sides You move against me:
Hearing, sight, taste, touch, and scent.
To come out is to be caught; I cannot hide from You.
If I come out through sight I see Love
Painted in every form and color,
Inviting me to come to You, to dwell in You.
If I leave through the door of hearing,
What I hear points only to You, Lord;
I cannot escape Love through this gage.
If I come out through taste, every flavor proclaims:
"Love, divine Love, hungering Love!
You have caught me on Your hook, for you want to reign in me."
If I leave through the door of scent
I sense You in all creation; You have caught me
And wounded me through that fragrance.
If I come out through the sense of touch
I find Your lineaments in every creature;
To try to flee from You is madness.”

Jacopone da Todi (1236–1306) Italian Franciscan mystic

The Lauds

Love, Hunger, Color, Sense

“The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the gray-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass?
Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Two (pp. 50-51).

Men, Flowers, Grass, Water

“I breathe in the full scent of her. If it ends tomorrow or in eighty years, I could breathe her for the rest of my life. But I want more. I need more. I tilt her slender jaw up with my hand so that she's looking at me. I was going to say something important. Something memorable. But I've forgotten it in her eyes. That gulf that divided us is still there, filled with questions and recrimination and guilt, but that's only part of love, part of being human. Everything is cracked, everything is stained except the fragile moments that hang crystalline in time and make life worth living.”

Pierce Brown book Morning Star

Source: Morning Star (2016), Ch. 56: In Time

Love, Life, Question, Time

“This was a solitary walk where the sun and the scents of wild flowers would act on a tortured mind like a soothing drug.”

Lindsey Davis book See Delphi and Die

See Delphi and Die

Flowers, Sun

“West Lake flower garden: a desert, now.
Alone, at the window, I read through old pages.
A smudge of rouge, a scent of perfume, but
I still weep.
Is there a Fate for books?
Why mourn for a half-burned poem?
There is nothing, there is no one to question,
and yet this misery feels like my own.
Ah, in another three hundred years
will anyone weep, remembering my fate?”

Nguyễn Du (1765–1820) Vietnamese poet

"Reading Hsiao-ch'ing", in The Harpercollins World Reader: The Modern World, eds. Mary Ann Caws and Christopher Prendergast (HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), ISBN 978-0065013832, p. 1411
Hsiao-Ching was "a seventeenth-century poet who was forced to become a concubine to a man whose jealous primary wife burned almost all of her poems" — David Damrosch, "Global Scripts and the Formation of Literary Traditions", in Approaches to World Literature (2013), p. 98

Fate, Books, Feeling, Flowers

“Men, be vigilant!
Those are killers.
They don't care about introspection, still-lifes, structuralism, colours and sounds:
They kill.
They don't care about Chuang-tzu, Kafka, the unconscious and the subconscious, Breton and surrealism, Hamlet and "to be or not to be," they just don't care;
They kill.
They sweep on us as the twitter of birds greets the coming of dawn
Or during starlit and love-laden nights
Or when the sky is at its bluest
When gardens are fragrant with the scent of flowers
And the fruit sweet like human lips.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"The Enemy and Us", in Vietnam Courier (December 1972), quoted in Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War by Mary Hershberger (Syracuse University Press, 1998), ISBN 978-0815605171, p. 180

Love, Life, Men, Flowers

“I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,
With no meaning, than this bitter one.”

Edward Thomas (1878–1917) Poet and journalist

Poem Old Man http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/old-man/

Thinking

“Maia lifted her gaze to watch low clouds briefly occult a brightly speckled, placid sea, its green shoals aflicker with silver schools of fish and the flapping shadows of hovering swoop-birds. The variegated colors were lush, voluptuous. Mixing with scents carried by the moist, heavy wind, they made a stew for the senses, spiced with fecund exudates of life.
The beauty was heavy-handed, adamantly consoling. She got the point—that life goes on.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 4 (p. 80)

Life, School, Beauty, Color

“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."”

Peter Ackroyd (1949) English author

Chatterton (London: Abacus, [1987] 1991), ch. 5, p. 72.

Clothes

“We scent the air of the office. We realize that certain things are wanted, certain things unwanted. There is an atmosphere favorable to Fascism. We find that out when some little pro-Mussolini item is played up, some big item, not so pleasant to the hero of our era, played down, or left out. In the future we send pro-Mussolini stuff only. We get a cable of congratulations.”

George Seldes (1890–1995) American journalist

Can These Things Be!

Future

“My ears open nasals! beware! such joy is yours o my people to sense see ear scent drink everything everything everything taratatatatata the machineguns shouting twisting under a thousand bites slaps traaktraak cudgellings whippings pic pac POUMTOUMB juggling clowns’ jump in full sky height 200 meters it's the gunshooting Downwards guffaws of swamps laughter buffalos chariots stings prancing of horses ammunition-wagons flue flac zang chaak chaak rearings pirouettes patatraak bespatterings manesneighings i i i i i i i medley tinklings three bulgarian batallions on the move crook- craak (double bar slowly) Choumi Maritza o Karvavena officers' shouts copper plates knocking against each other pam ici (vite) pac over there BOUM-pam-pam-pam here there there farther all around very high look-out goddamnit on the head chaak marvelous! flames flames flames flames flames flames flames crawl from forts over there Choukri Pacha telephone orders to 27 forts in turkish German hello Ibrahim! Rudolf hello! hello! actors roles blowing-echoes odor-hay-mud-manure I can't feel my frozen feet stale odor rotting gongs flutes clarinets pipes everywhere up down birds twitter beatitude shade greenness cipcip ip-zzip herds pastures dong-dong-dong-ding-bééé Orchestra”

Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) Electronic music pioneer and Futurist painter

Source: 1910's, The Art of Noise', 1913, p. 8

People, Feeling, Drink, Bird

“I have, perhaps, too professional a point of view where deaths are concerned. They are divided, in my mind, into two classes — deaths which are my affair and deaths which are not my affair — and though the latter class is infinitely more numerous — nevertheless whenever I come in contact with death I am like the dog who lifts his head and sniffs the scent.”

Agatha Christie book Death in the Clouds

Death in the Clouds (1935)

Death, Dogs

“She turned to Gansey.
"Blue," he warned, but his voice was chaotic. This close, his throat was scented with mint and wool sweater and vinyl car seat, and Gansey, just Gansey. She said, "I just want to pretend. I want to pretend that I could."”

Maggie Stiefvater (1981) American writer

pg 199-200
The Raven Cycle Series, Blue Lily, Lily Blue (2014)

Cars

“The picture rises before us vivid and bright: the finely carved, dragon-shaped prow; the high, curving stern; the long row of shields, black and yellow alternately, ranged along the sides; the gleam of steel; the scent of murder.”

Winston S. Churchill book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

On the Viking Long Ships, Vol I; The Birth of Britain.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58)

“What joy have I in June's return?
My feet are parched—my eyeballs burn,
I scent no flowery gust;
But faint the flagging Zephyr springs,
With dry Macadam on its wings,
And turns me "dust to dust."”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

Ode Imitated from Horace (1844), st. 2.
1840s

Spring, Joy

“Never stop to breathe the pretty flower scents. The graves of the poor still stink.”

Lindsey Davis book The Accusers

The Accusers

Flowers

“Tis something, if in absence we can see
The footsteps of the past: it soothes the heart
To breathe the air scented in other years
By lips beloved; to wander through the groves
Where once we were not lonely”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Guerilla Chief
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Past, Heart

“Sheep were docile, yes, but vigilant. Unlike many people, sheep were always aware that predators existed and were alert for the scent and the schemes of wolves.
Contemporary Americans were so proseperous, so happily distracted by such a richness of vivid entertainments, they were reluctant to have their fun diminished by acknowledging that anything existed with fangs and fierce appetites. If now and then they recognized a wolf, they threw a bone to it and convinced themselves it was a dog.”

Dean Koontz book The Good Guy

Krait's musings
Source: The Good Guy (2007), Chapter 7, pp. 52-53

People, Dogs, Wolf

“You ask of me then for what reason it was that Pythagoras abstained from eating of flesh. I for my part do much admire in what humor, with what soul or reason, the first man with his mouth touched slaughter, and reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animal, and having set before people courses of ghastly corpses and ghosts, could give those parts the names of meat and victuals, that but a little before lowed, cried, moved, and saw; how his sight could endure the blood of slaughtered, flayed, and mangled bodies; how his smell could bear their scent; and how the very nastiness happened not to offend the taste, while it chewed the sores of others, and participated of the saps and juices of deadly wounds.”

Plutarch book Moralia

I, 1
Moralia, Of Eating of Flesh

People, Soul, Animals, Parting

“Halfway up the slope, guarded by a group of tall, slim, cypress-trees, nestled a small strawberry-pink villa, like some exotic fruit lying in the greenery. The cypress-trees undulated gently in the breeze, as if they were busily painting the sky a still brighter blue for our arrival.
The villa was small and square, standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink-faced determination. Its shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate creamy-green, cracked and bubbled in places. The garden, surrounded by tall fuschia hedges, had the flower beds worked in complicated geometrical patterns, marked with smooth white stones. The white cobbled paths, scarcely as wide as a rake's head, wound laboriously round beds hardly larger than a big straw hat, beds in the shape of stars, half-moons, triangles, and circles all overgrown with a shaggy tangle of flowers run wild. Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers, flame-red, moon-white, glossy, and unwrinkled; marigolds like broods of shaggy suns stood watching their parent's progress through the sky. In the low growth the pansies pushed their velvety, innocent faces through the leaves, and the violets drooped sorrowfully under their heart-shaped leaves. The bougainvillaea that sprawled luxuriously over the tiny iron balcony was hung, as though for a carnival, with its lantern-shaped magenta flowers. In the darkness of the fuschia-hedge a thousand ballerina-like blooms quivered expectantly. The warm air was thick with the scent of a hundred dying flowers, and full of the gentle, soothing whisper and murmur of insects.”

Gerald Durrell book My Family and Other Animals

My Family and Other Animals (1956)

Star, Flowers, Lying, Parent

“Beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the evening gale.”

Robert Burns The Cotter's Saturday Night

Stanza 9
The Cotter's Saturday Night (1786)

“The presence of evil, once scented, tends to bring out all that is most irrational and uncontrollable in the public imagination. It is a catalyst for pea-brained theories, gimcrack scholarship, and the credulous cosmologies of hysteria.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

The God of Dark Laughter https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/04/09/the-god-of-dark-laughter, The New Yorker (April 9, 2001)

Imagination, Evil

“We have neither killed anyone nor have we committed any crime for so many of our children to keep being murdered here each day as a punishment. There is a boy, Ateeq, who lived in this sector, who was martyred just this morning; and all praise is due to Allah, his grave gave off a fragrance. All of us could smell it, and it was exactly the scent which came from my father's grave. We believe that if even a few people stand up to a large army, they can confront it if they are on the Truth; and we are on the Truth -- that is why we have been able to fight them for so long.”

Abdul Rashid Ghazi (1964–2007) Pakistani fundamentalist

Children, People, Truth, Boy

“Whoever killed "Muaahadan" a confederate (a term used in Islamic state to refer to non-Muslim citizens), will not smell Paradise. And its scent can be smelled from a distance of forty years”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

a term in Arabic means "far distance"
Narrated By An-Nasaie [citation needed]
Sunni Hadith

“…the eyes, black, were all East - houris, harems, beds scented with Biblical spices; nose and lips were pan-Mediterranean. Her body…was that of the Shulamite and Italian film stars. The décolletage, with its promise of round, brown, infinitely smooth, vertiginous sensual treasure, was a torment to the blood…. Many had promised marriage, but all had gone home, the promise unfulfilled…. quite considerable capacity for all kinds of sensuous pleasure.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Beds in the East (1959)

Marriage, Pleasure, Home, Star

“Once again, I experienced that overwhelming joy in the universe that I had felt in London outside the V and A. But this time, my consciousness of the world seemed larger, more complex. It was the mystic's sensation of oneness, of everything blending into everything else. Everything I looked at reminded me of something else, which also became present to my consciousness, as if I were simultaneously seeing a million worlds and smelling a million scents and hearing a million sounds-- not mixed up, but each separate and clear. I was overwhelmed with a sense of my smallness in the face of this vast, beautiful, objective universe, this universe whose chief miracle is that it exists, as well as myself. It is no dream, but a great garden in which life is trying to obtain a foothold. I experienced a desire to burst into tears of gratitude; then I controlled it, and the feeling subsided into a calm sense of immense, infinite beauty.”

Colin Wilson book The Philosopher's Stone

Source: The Philosopher's Stone (1969), p. 237-238

Life, World, Beauty, Dreams

“Body odour (known also as scent of the immortals) is a disgusting condition with an awful, nauseating smell.”

Gao Xingjian book Soul Mountain

Source: Soul Mountain (1989), ch. 1, p. 6

“Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to book. He was the old-style man of letters, but galvanized and with the iron of purpose in him.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

V. S. Pritchett, The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980) [Random House, ISBN 0-394-74683-X], "Edmund Wilson: Towards Revolution," p. 141
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

Books, Sense

“The Prophet said, "Nobody who dies and finds good from Allah (in the hereafter) would wish to come back to this world even if he were given the whole world and whatever is in it, except the martyr who, on seeing the superiority of martyrdom, would like to come back to the world and get killed again (in Allah's cause). The Prophet said, "A single endeavor (of fighting) in Allah's cause in the afternoon or in the forenoon is better than all the world and whatever is in it. A place in Paradise as small as the bow or lash of one of you is better than all the world and whatever is in it. And if a houri from Paradise appeared to the people of the earth, she would fill the space between Heaven and the Earth with light and pleasant scent and her head cover is better than the world and whatever is in it."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Narrated Anas bin Malik, in Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 53
Sunni Hadith

People, World, Light, Appearance