Quotes about scent
page 2

“It ain't by princerples nor men
My preudunt course is steadied—
I scent wich pays the best, an' then
Go into it baldheaded.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

No. 6, st. 10
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series I (1848)

Men

“And every bird I ever knew
Back and forth in the summer flew;
And breezes wafted over me
The scent of every flower and tree:
Till I forgot the pain and gloom
And silence of my darkened room”

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) Novelist, poet, writer, activist

from Shadow of Birds

Pain, Flowers, Bird, Tree

“The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

" Out, Out — http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/out-out-2/" 1910s

“Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love. "She supposed that she was being gracefully dull and standardized in the Smails' presence, but they scented the heretic, and with forward-stooping delight they sat and tried to drag out her ludicrous concepts for their amusement. They were like the Sunday-afternoon mob starting at monkeys in the Zoo, poking fingers and making faces and giggling at the resentment of the more dignified race… They were staggered to learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden;… that there are Ministers of the Gospel who accept evolution; that some persons of intelligence and business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight;… that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel organ… 'Where does she get all them the'ries?'”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

marveled Uncle Whittier Smail.
Main Street (1920)

Love, Men, Children, Intelligence

“Mitt did not quite forget his perfect land. He remembered it, though a little fuzzily, next time the wind dropped, but he did not set off to look for it again. It was plain to him that soldiers only brought you back again if you went. It made him sad. When an inkling of it came to him in silence, or in scents, or, later, if the wind hummed a certain note, or a storm came shouting in from the sea and he caught the same note in the midst of its noise, he thought of his lost perfect place and felt for a moment as if his heart would break.”

Diana Wynne Jones (1934–2011) English children's fantasy writer

Source: Dalemark Quartet, Drowned Ammet (1977), p. 233.

Sadness, Silence, Time, Heart

“Man is in pursuit of two goals: he is looking for happinesse and, being by essence empty ("étant vide par essence", Fr.), he is trying to fill (or take up, - "remplir", Fr.) his life; the latter reason play a more considerable role than we ordinarily think. What we take for vainglory, ambition, love of power and riches (or wealth), is often, indeed, a need to mask this emptiness, a need to let one's hair down (or to live it up), to put oneself on a false scent or trail.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

de se donner le change", Fr.
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 56.

Love, Life, Thinking, Change

“By lamplight turn these scented leaves and read
a tale of love recorded in old books.”

Nguyễn Du The Tale of Kieu

Source: The Tale of Kiều (1813), Lines 7–8

Love, Books, Reading

“A young man with dark circles under his eyes was propping himself up against a penny-in-the-slot machine. An undertaker, passing at that moment, would have looked at this young man sharply, scenting business. So would a buzzard.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Luck of the Bodkins

The Luck of the Bodkins (1935)

Business

“If all the wisdom of the world and all its art—all the spoils that it has won from nature, all the fire that it has snatched from heaven—were gathered together and divided into heaps, and we could point and say, for instance, these mighty truths were flashed forth in the brilliant salon amid the ripple of light laughter and the sparkle of bright eyes; and this deep knowledge was dug up in the quiet study, where the bust of Pallas looks serenely down on the leather-scented shelves; and this heap belongs to the crowded street; and that to the daisied field—the heap that would tower up high above the rest as a mountain above hills would be the one at which we should look up and say: this noblest pile of all—these glorious paintings and this wondrous music, these trumpet words, these solemn thoughts, these daring deeds, they were forged and fashioned amid misery and pain in the sordid squalor of the city garret. There, from their eyries, while the world heaved and throbbed below, the kings of men sent forth their eagle thoughts to wing their flight through the ages. There, where the sunlight streaming through the broken panes fell on rotting boards and crumbling walls; there, from their lofty thrones, those rag-clothed Joves have hurled their thunderbolts and shaken, before now, the earth to its foundations.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Wisdom, Men, Pain, Truth

“But just as the world grew right again,
We heard a wanderer out on the plain
Singing what none of us understood;
Yet we thought that the world grew thrice more sweet
And the meadows were blossoming under his feet.
And we felt a grand and beautiful fear,
For we knew that a marvellous thought drew near;
So we kept the glass for a little while:
And the skies grew deeper and twice as bright,
And the seas grew soft as a flower of light,
And the meadows rippled from stile to stile;
And memories danced in a musical throng
Thro' the blossom that scented the wonderful song.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Part III : The Mystic Ruby
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), The Flower of Old Japan

World, Fear, Beauty, Music

“I have loved flowers that fade,
Within whose magic tents
Rich hues have marriage made
With sweet unmemoried scents:
A honeymoon delight,
A joy of love at sight,
That ages in an hour
My song be like a flower!”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

Bk. II, No. 13, I Have Loved Flowers That Fade http://www.poetry-online.org/bridges_i_have_loved_flowers_that_fade.htm, st. 1 (1879). Shorter Poems (1879-1893)

Love, Marriage, Age, Flowers

“The juniper-scented liquor had volatilized his thoughts; he should be thinking that madness caused this man to call himself a king, but was thinking rather that kingship had driven this man mad.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 5

Thinking, Madness

“Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings even by their scents alone.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 10: A Wind-Storm in the Forests

Reading

“Soft carpet-knights, all scenting musk and amber.”

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer

Second Week, Third Day, Part i. Compare: "As much valour is to be found in feasting as in fighting, and some of our city captains and carpet knights will make this good, and prove it", Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part i, Section 2, Membrane 2, Subsection 2.
La Seconde Semaine (1584)

“She and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion, — when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Love, Youth, Passion, Time

“A man who from the beginning has long been soaked in the languid atmosphere of a woman, the scent of her hands, her bosom, her knees, her hair, her lithe and flowing clothes,Sweet bath, suavely
Scented with ointments,has acquired a delicacy of skin, a refinement of tone, a kind of androgyny without which the toughest and most virile of geniuses remains, when it comes to artistic perfection, an incomplete being.”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Paradis artificiels

L’homme qui, dès le commencement, a été longtemps baigné dans la molle atmosphère de la femme, dans l’odeur de ses mains, de son sein, de ses genoux, de sa chevelure, de ses vêtements souples et flottants,Dulce balneum suavibus Unguentatum odoribus,y a contracté une délicatesse d’épiderme et une distinction d’accent, une espèce d’androgynéité, sans lesquelles le génie le plus âpre et le plus viril reste, relativement à la perfection dans l’art, un être incomplet. "Un mangeur d'opium," VII: Chagrins d'enfance http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Paradis_artificiels_-_II#VII_CHAGRINS_D.E2.80.99ENFANCE Les paradis artificiels (1860)

Perfection, Clothes

“He walks without legs,
hears without ears,
does all the deeds without hands.
He enjoys all the juices without a mouth,
spells all the truth without a voice,
touches everything without hands.
He see very object without eyes
and inhales all the scents without a breath.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

Tulsidas’s definition of God in verse quoted in A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics http://books.google.co.in/books?id=5em1y2PczVgC&pg=PA36, p. 36

Truth

“I call it simply the Book, with no qualifications or epithets, and in this abstinence and restraint there is a helpless sigh, silent capitulation to the immeasurableness of the transcendent; for no word, no allusion, could glisten, scent the air, or drift with such a shudder of terror, with any inkling of that unnameable thing, the very first taste of which, on the tip of the tongue, surpasses the capacity of our rapture.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Book” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/book1.htm His father, Books

Books

“The Flower of Old Japan.
The Flower above all other flowers,
The Flower that never dies;
Before whose throne the scented hours
Offer their sacrifice;
The Flower that here on earth below
Reveals the heavenly plan;
But only little children know
The Flower of Old Japan.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Song
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), The Flower of Old Japan

Children, Flowers

“Every scent is the sun’s scent.”

Dejan Stojanovic book The Creator

“The Land,” p. p. 91
The Creator (2000), Sequence: “Nostalgic Elements”

Sun

“No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life.”

Graham Greene book The Third Man

The Third Man (1949)

Life

“There is nothing more splendid than the prospect of sitting in the morning before a new ink-stone and a sheet of white paper. The smell of the white paper is like the scent of the skin of a new lover who has just paid a surprise visit out of a rainy garden. And the black ink is like lacquered hair. And the quill? Well the quill is like the instrument of pleasure whose purpose is never in doubt but whose surprising efficiency one always -- always forgets.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

, quoted in Peter Greenaway's The
The Pillow Book

Pleasure, Lovers, Forgetting

“That night we visited various places where well-shaped and scented, though completely naked, Japanese girls came to sit on male knees.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Girl, Night

“The alphas are the most important members because they are the decision makers and without them the pack is leaderless. So their survival is paramount. If food is scarce, they will eat first and they may be the only ones who do eat. Other members of the pack will go hungry, even the pups, and starve if necessary. And the rest of the pack knows better than to touch something that has the beta's scent on it.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

The Man who lives with Wolves (2010)

Food, Decision

“Daybreak comes quickly nowadays
The scent of wind has changed
It seems familiar yet unfamiliar
It makes my heartbeat quicker
It's sweet and sad
We ran along the road to the sea
Screaming with laughter innocently
In the far-away summer days”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Fairyland
Lyrics, (Miss)Understood

Sadness, Laughter, Change, Summer

“I can understand the ignorant masses loving to soak themselves in drink—oh, yes, it's very shocking that they should, of course—very shocking to us who live in cozy homes, with all the graces and pleasures of life around us, that the dwellers in damp cellars and windy attics should creep from their dens of misery into the warmth and glare of the public-house bar, and seek to float for a brief space away from their dull world upon a Lethe stream of gin. But think, before you hold up your hands in horror at their ill-living, what "life" for these wretched creatures really means. Picture the squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged on from year to year in the narrow, noisome room where, huddled like vermin in sewers, they welter, and sicken, and sleep; where dirt-grimed children scream and fight and sluttish, shrill-voiced women cuff, and curse, and nag; where the street outside teems with roaring filth and the house around is a bedlam of riot and stench. Think what a sapless stick this fair flower of life must be to them, devoid of mind and soul. The horse in his stall scents the sweet hay and munches the ripe corn contentedly. The watch-dog in his kennel blinks at the grateful sun, dreams of a glorious chase over the dewy fields, and wakes with a yelp of gladness to greet a caressing hand. But the clod-like life of these human logs never knows one ray of light. From the hour when they crawl from their comfortless bed to the hour when they lounge back into it again they never live one moment of real life. Recreation, amusement, companionship, they know not the meaning of. Joy, sorrow, laughter, tears, love, friendship, longing, despair, are idle words to them. From the day when their baby eyes first look out upon their sordid world to the day when, with an oath, they close them forever and their bones are shoveled out of sight, they never warm to one touch of human sympathy, never thrill to a single thought, never start to a single hope. In the name of the God of mercy; let them pour the maddening liquor down their throats and feel for one brief moment that they live!”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love, Life, Women, God

“It is imagination that has taught man the moral sense of color, of contour, of sound and of scent. It created, in the beginning of the world, analogy and metaphor. It disassembles creation, and with materials gathered and arranged by rules whose origin is only to be found in the very depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of the new. As it has created the world (this can be said, I believe, even in the religious sense), it is just that it should govern it.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

C'est l'imagination qui a enseigné à l'homme le sens moral de la couleur, du contour, du son et du parfum. Elle a créé, au commencement du monde, l'analogie et la métaphore. Elle décompose toute la création, et, avec les matériaux amassés et disposés suivant des règles dont on ne peut trouver l'origine que dans le plus profond de l'âme, elle crée un monde nouveau, elle produit la sensation du neuf. Comme elle a créé le monde (on peut bien dire cela, je crois, même dans un sens religieux), il est juste qu'elle le gouverne. "Lettres à M. le Directeur de La revue française," III: La reine des facultés http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Salon_de_1859_%28Curiosit%C3%A9s_esth%C3%A9tiques%29#III._.E2.80.94_La_reine_des_facult.C3.A9s Salon de 1859 (1859)

World, Color, Soul, Imagination

“The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but as a family; this resentment expressed itself in an added perfection of raiment, an exuberance of family cordiality, an exaggeration of family importance, and — the sniff. Danger — so indispensable in bringing out the fundamental quality of any society, group, or individual — was what the Forsytes scented; the premonition of danger put a burnish on their armour. For the first time, as a family, they appeared to have an instinct of being in contact, with some strange and unsafe thing.”

John Galsworthy book The Man of Property

The Man of Property (1906) Volume I of The Forsyte Saga.

Family, Appearance, Time, Perfection

“FATIMA (raises her head, brightens up, and makes a beautiful smile): Husein, this qanoon scents like crazy, you would think a rose from Ta’if smells. C’mon, bend and get a sniff of it, it won’t bite you.”

Vinko Vrbanić (1951)

Dvadeseto pjevanje, drama, 2nd shared prize, Act 3
Qanoon

Smile, Beauty, Thinking

“I wish more English teachers helped their students engage the classics at the level of raw delight, instead of putting them on the scent of symbols. A novel is not a cryptogram.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), P. S. (p. 15)

Teachers, Help

“It’s a special kind of hugging, the kind where deep down you’re facing the unspoken fact that this’s the last time you’re gonna hold somebody, and so you make your cells hold on, make em drink in somebody’s scent and texture, so you can keep em with you after the world has taken em away.”

Malcolm Azania book The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad

Source: The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (2004), Chapter 90 “Unfurl the Sails, Speak the Names of the Stars” (p. 514)

World, Drink, Time

“The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose'. But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told me, 'is the best: it has no taste.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
Source: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 3

World, Dogs, Way, Flowers

“The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.”

Marc Bloch (1886–1944) French historian, medievalist, and historiographer

The Historian's Craft, pg.26

“Think not that I have come in quest of common flowers; but rather to bemoan the loss of one whose scent has vanished from the air.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Source: Translations, The Tale of Genji (1925–1933), Ch. 41: 'Mirage'

Flowers, Thinking, Loss

“She sent him scented letters,
And he received them with a strange delight.
Just like his wife
But how she was before the tears,
And how she was before the years flew by,
And how she was when she was beautiful.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Source: Song lyrics, Never for Ever (1980)

Beauty, Tear

“So soon as Squire Cass's standing dishes diminished in plenty and freshness, his guests had nothing to do but to walk a little higher up the village to Mr. Osgood's, at the Orchards, and they found hams and chines uncut, pork-pies with the scent of the fire in them, spun butter in all its freshness — everything, in fact, that appetites at leisure could desire, in perhaps greater perfection, though not in greater abundance, than at Squire Cass's.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 3 (at page 24)

Perfection

“And breath, deeply from this envelope, it smells like you, and I, cant be, without that scent, its filling me, with all you mean to me”

Chris Carrabba (1975) American musician

Living in Your Letter

“Once when Adam had still lived in the trailer park, he had been pushing the lawn mower around the straggly side yard when he realized that it was raining a mile away. He could smell it, the earthy scent of rain on dirt, but also the electric, restless smell of ozone. And he could see it: a hazy sheet of water blocking his view of the mountains. He could track the line of rain travelling across the vast dry field towards him. It was heavy and dark, and he knew he would get drenched if he stayed outside. It was coming from so far away that he had plenty of time to put the mower away and get under cover. Instead, though, he just stood there. he closed his eyes and let the storm soak him.
That was this kiss.”

Maggie Stiefvater (1981) American writer

pg 242-243
The Raven Cycle Series, The Raven King (2016)

Travel, Mountain, Kiss, Water

“Getting a man to love you is easy Only be honest about your wants as Woman. Stand nude before the glass with him So that he sees himself the stronger one And believes it so, and you so much more Softer, younger, lovelier. Admit your Admiration. Gift him all, Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts, The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your Endless female hungers. Oh yes, getting A man to love is easy, but living Without him afterwards may have to be Faced.”

Kamala Surayya (1934–2009) Indian author

Kamala Suraiyya Das

Love, Hunger

“Think not that I have come in quest of common flowers; but rather to bemoan the loss of one whose scent has vanished from the air.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Tale of Genji

Source: Tale of Genji, The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 41: Mirage

Flowers, Thinking, Loss

“Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys,
Unfriendly to society's chief joys,
Thy worst effect is banishing for hours
The sex whose presence civilizes ours.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Source: Conversation (1782), Line 251.

Sex, Joy

“He said: "If I thought more of myself?"
"You wouldn't have much difficulty in finding it," she answered. "Let's walk."
He didn't understand the first phrase, but he turned and went by her side, silent while he heard the words. Much difficulty in finding what? in finding it? the it that could be found if he thought of himself more; that was what he had said or she had said, whichever had said that the thing was to be found, as if Adela had said it, Adela in her real self, by no means the self that went with Hugh; no, but the true, the true Adela who was apart and his; for that was the difficulty all the while, that she was truly his, and wouldn't be, but if he thought more of her truly being, and not of her being untruly away, on whatever way, for the way that went away was not the way she truly went, but if they did away with the way she went away, then Hugh could be untrue and she true, then he would know themselves, two, true and two, on the way he was going, and the peace in himself, and the scent of her in him, and the her, meant for him, in him; that was the she he knew, and he must think the more of himself.”

Charles Williams book Descent into Hell

Descent into Hell (1937), Ch. 5, "Return to Eden"

Peace, Way, Understanding, Thinking

“I knew that scent was important and I discovered that if I put on different clothes or washed or at different food, the beta male would start nipping me again until he was satisfied that the new smell didn't mean I was going to react differently to his approach or that my mood had changed. The other high-ranking wolves did the same thing, but it didn't involve every wolf in the enclosure. The lower-ranking members of the pack, I was to learn, don't question what the higher-ranking members decide; they are foot soldiers - they have an important job to do, but it is not to think for themselves.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

The Man who lives with Wolves (2010)

Food, Mood, Question, Thinking

“One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.”

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Russian composer, pianist and conductor

1962, quoted in Andriessen and Schoenberger, The Apollonian Clockwork (1989). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1960s

“By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places — whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest — where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book Young Goodman Brown

"Young Goodman Brown" (1835) from Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

Heart

“Personally, I regard alcohol, used in moderation, as a medicine in the Polar regions. … It is another matter on sledge journeys: there … alcohol must be banished … on account of the weight and space. … Two men who have fallen out a little in the course of the week are reconciled at once by the scent of rum; the past is forgotten, and they start afresh in friendly co-operation.”

Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) Norwegian polar researcher, who was the first to reach the South Pole

Sydpolen (The South Pole) (1912)

Men, Alcohol, Past, Personality

“Another soft and scented page,
Fill’d with more honied words!
What motives to a pilgrimage
A shrine like mine affords!
I know, before I break the seal,
The words that I shall find:”

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

Belinda, or The Love Letter
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Motivation

“Nature, exerting an unwearied power,
Forms, opens, and gives scent to every flower;
Spreads the fresh verdure of the field, and leads
The dancing Naiads through the dewy meads.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Source: Table Talk (1782), Line 690.

Flowers, Nature, Dance

“I was not in full control of myself, and it seemed that I knew her name from before. The evil in her eyes, her color, her scent and her movements were all familiar to me. It was as though my souls, in the life before this, in the world of imagination, had bordered on her soul and that both souls, of the same essence and substance, were destined for union. I must have lived this life very close to her. I had no desire to touch her; the invisible beams that emanated from our bodies and mingled were sufficient for me. Isn't this terrifying experience which seemed so familiar to met quite the same as the feelings of two lovers who feel that they have known each other before and that a mysterious relationship has previously existed between them? Was it possible that someone else could affect me? The dry, repulsive and ominous laughter of the old man, however, tore our bonds asunder.”

Sadegh Hedayat book The Blind Owl

The Blind Owl

Life, World, Color, Feeling

“11. We shall sing the great masses shaken with work, pleasure, or rebellion: we shall sing the multicolored and polyphonic tidal waves of revolution in the modern metropolis; shall sing the vibrating nocturnal fervor of factories and shipyards burning under violent electrical moons; bloated railroad stations that devour smoking serpents; factories hanging from the sky by the twisting threads of spiraling smoke; bridges like gigantic gymnasts who span rivers, flashing at the sun with the gleam of a knife; adventurous steamships that scent the horizon, locomotives with their swollen chest, pawing the tracks like massive steel horses bridled with pipes, and the oscillating flight of airplanes, whose propeller flaps at the wind like a flag and seems to applaud like a delirious crowd.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

Original Italian text:
Noi canteremo le grandi folle agitate dal lavoro, dal piacere o dalla sommossa: canteremo le maree multicolori e polifoniche delle rivoluzioni nelle capitali moderne; canteremo il vibrante fervore notturno degli arsenali e dei cantieri incendiati da violente lune elettriche; le stazioni ingorde, divoratrici di serpi che fumano; le officine appese alle nuvole pei contorti fili dei loro fumi; i ponti simili a ginnasti giganti che scavalcano i fiumi, balenanti al sole con un luccichio di coltelli; i piroscafi avventurosi che fiutano l'orizzonte, le locomotive dall'ampio petto, che scalpitano sulle rotaie, come enormi cavalli d'acciaio imbrigliati di tubi, e il volo scivolante degli aereoplani, la cui elica garrisce al vento come una bandiera e sembra applaudire come una folla entusiasta.
Source: 1900's, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism' 1909, p. 52 : Last bullet-item in THE MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

Pleasure, Singing, Sun, Horse

“The fairest things have fleetest end,
Their scent survives their close:
But the rose's scent is bitterness
To him that loved the rose.”

Francis Thompson (1859–1907) British poet

Daisy http://www.bartleby.com/103/26.html (1893), st. 10.

Love

“The real fast is the blossoming of the inner heart. Fragrance must emanate. The qualities, conduct, behavior, and disposition that accompany this blossoming make no sound. Light and fragrance must dawn in the inner heart. The one point which is God must resplend. Do fast, but make sure the heart blossoms; make it fragrant. The flowering scent must emanate, and when that space is perceived, the One who inhales that perfume will come. The One who perceives that fragrance will come. He is the Lord.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

The Fast of Ramadan: The Inner Heart Blossoms (2005)

God, Behavior, Flowers, Light

“Mademoiselle,” I said, “it is sometimes difficult for a dog to find a scent, but once he has found it, nothing on earth will make him leave it! That is if he is a good dog! And I, mademoiselle, I, Hercule Poirot, am a very good dog.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases (1974)

Dogs

“Nature’s constantly screaming with all its shapes and scents: love each other! Love each other! Do as the flowers. There’s only love.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Garden of Tortures

Love, Flowers, Nature

“I have tried to imagine … the various ingredients one might wish to compound in such a package. Beside the bare experience itself, the context of it, one might say, he should want to capture and hold all the subsidiary factors which might serve as a background for it — the sound, the feel of wind and sun, the cloud floating in the sky, the color and the scent. For such a packaging, to give the desired results, must be as perfect as one can make it. It must have all those elements which would be valuable in invoking the total recall of some event that had taken place many years before…”

Clifford D. Simak book Cemetery World

Cemetery World (1973)
Context: I find it a most intriguing and amusing thing that it might be possible to package the experiences, not only of one's self, but of other people. Think of the hoard we might then lay up against our later, lonely years when all old friends are gone and the opportunity for new experiences have withered. All we need to do then is to reach up to a shelf and take down a package that we have bottled or preserved or whatever the phrase might be, say from a hundred years ago, and uncorking it, enjoy the same experience again, as sharp and fresh as the first time it had happened... I have tried to imagine... the various ingredients one might wish to compound in such a package. Beside the bare experience itself, the context of it, one might say, he should want to capture and hold all the subsidiary factors which might serve as a background for it — the sound, the feel of wind and sun, the cloud floating in the sky, the color and the scent. For such a packaging, to give the desired results, must be as perfect as one can make it. It must have all those elements which would be valuable in invoking the total recall of some event that had taken place many years before...

Color, Feeling, Imagination, Sun

“One, we are one with the song to-day,
One with the clover that scents the world,
One with the Unknown, far away,
One with the stars, when earth grows old.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Unity, § II
The Golden Hynde and Other Poems (1914)
Context: Heart of my heart, we cannot die!
Love triumphant in flower and tree,
Every life that laughs at the sky
Tells us nothing can cease to be:
One, we are one with the song to-day,
One with the clover that scents the world,
One with the Unknown, far away,
One with the stars, when earth grows old.

World, Star

“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.”

Ian Fleming book Casino Royale

Opening line, Ch. 1 : The Secret Agent
Casino Royale (1953)
Context: The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul erosion produced by high gambling — a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension — becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.

“The rich scent of well-balanced soil was like incense.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 7 (p. 76)

“It was one of those winter days in Los Angeles when the wind has swept away the smog and the air is clear and the light still and everything has the immediacy of a dream. I parked on a street called Overland in the Hollywood Hills. It was lined with white-skinned birch trees. Their nude branches shimmered against the sky. Tattered yellow leaves clogged the gutters and the air was scented with the rainy smell of eucalyptus. There were no cars on the street and the houses were barely visible behind walls and fences and sweeping lawns that had never been trod upon except by gardeners.”

Michael Nava (1954) American writer

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Goldenboy (1988), p.132

Tree, Housing, Light, Dreams

“I like a bush. A nice big, hairy, stinky, smelly fucking bush. And I hate when they put cologne on it. They dummy it up with cologne like you don’t know where you are. I like that nice natural scent of salmon.”

Andrew Dice Clay (1957) American comedian and actor

Dice Rules (1991)

Hate, Nature

“Fair were they also, diffusing the odor of musk as they moved,
Like the soft zephyr bringing with it the scent of the clove.”

Imru' al-Qais (501–544) Arabic Poet

The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Vol. 5, p. 20
Poetry, Couplets

“The sky is colored like a peacock's breast;
There lingers yet one thin, chill line of gold
Down where the woods their somber branches hold
In silhouette against the fading west.
Dark leaves, dark earth, slow-breathing and at rest,
Whence frail scents rise of dew-wet grass and mold.
A single star gleams diamond-clear and cold,
Like one sharp note from elfin viol wrest.
This is the haunted hour,—such woods surround
Grey Merlin in his oak, adrouse with dwale;
In such a gloaming once the lorn knight found
⁠The faery woman in the river-vale;
And underneath this star long, long ago
The Dark Tower heard a lonely slug-horn blow!”

Leah Bodine Drake (1914–1964) American writer

1941, Weird Tales, Vol. 36, p. 105
Haunted Hour

Star, Grass, Color

“As long as there remains the scent of faith in the hearts of our Ghazis,
so long shall the sword of Hindustan flash before the throne of London.”

Bahadur Shah Zafar (1775–1862) Mughal emperor

during in the Indian Mutiny, 1857
Poetry

Faith, Heart

“Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that in the branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

Source: The Rubaiyat (1120)

Youth, Spring

“I would like every day to feel the scent of your skin, like the taste of your kiss, admire your sensuality, perceive your sweetness, listen to the beating of your heart, understand the depth of your soul, rejoice with your smile, have fun with your liking and be able to fully live your harmony.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Vorrei ogni giorno poter sentire il profumo della tua pelle, gradire il sapore di un tuo bacio, ammirare la tua sensualità, percepire la tua dolcezza, ascoltare il battito del tuo cuore, comprendere la profondità della tua anima, gioire con il tuo sorriso, divertirmi con la tua simpatia e poter vivere appieno la tua armonia.
Source: prevale.net

Soul, Understanding, Smile, Kiss

“So long as one can use scented candy to abate the foul breath of hypocrisy, Puritanism is triumphant.”

Emma Goldman book Anarchism and Other Essays

Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), The Hypocrisy of Puritanism

“Heart of my heart, we cannot die!
Love triumphant in flower and tree,
Every life that laughs at the sky
Tells us nothing can cease to be:
One, we are one with the song to-day,
One with the clover that scents the world,
One with the Unknown, far away,
One with the stars, when earth grows old.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Unity, § II
The Golden Hynde and Other Poems (1914)

Tree, Star, Flowers, World

“The most beautiful gift of nature is a pleasant morning whenever I see this beautiful sight of nature I fall in love with nature. A pleasant morning brings with it different colors of nature. Just like the green trees and plants that make my eyes feel relaxed, the blue color of the sky signifies ambition, the yellow color of the sun lights the lamp of hope in me, the red and pink colors of flowers fill me with love, these I am surprised to see all the colours. The scent of the wet soil in the morning along with the cool breeze fills me with freshness. When i hear the sweet chirping of birds, my heart starts humming.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Flowers, Nature, Bird, Love

“My virgin sense of sound was steeped
In the music of young streams;
And roses through the casement peeped,
And scented all my dreams.”

Alfred Austin (1835–1913) British writer and poet

"Prelude", stanza XI; p. ix., At the Gate of the Convent (1885)

Dreams, Music, Sense

“It is illicit for the heart to smell the scent of certainty while contentment with other-than-God dwells therein.”

Sahl al-Tustari (818–896) arabian Sufi, Islamic theologian

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 54

God, Heart

“What sweet nectars and scents would emerge once the depths of your essence are revealed.”

A.E. Samaan

Source: SHADES OF VANITY: Shades and Shadows of Eroticism

“I wish I could be next to you stroking your hair, warning the scent of your skin and looking into your eyes, sweetly bite your lips.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Vorrei poter essere accanto a te accarezzandoti i capelli, avvertendo il profumo della tua pelle e guardandoti negli occhi, mordere dolcemente le tue labbra.
Source: prevale.net

Quotes about scent page 2

Quotes about scent
page 2