Quotes about smell (642 quotes, page 3)

“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

“Mark my words, nothing smells worse than burned scorpion.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.”

Elizabeth Kostova book The Historian

Source: The Historian

Home

“He'd gone from sixteen to seventy-five in a matter of seconds, but the old-man smell happened instantly, like boom. Congratulations! You stink!”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

“Caddy smelled like trees.”

William Faulkner book The Sound and the Fury

Source: The Sound and the Fury

Tree

“Thanks to the long days of rain, the blades of grass glowed with a deep-green luster, and they gave off the smell of wildness unique to things that sink their roots into the earth.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Grass

“How do you know your Colossus is the genuine article in the first place?

I read his mind.

I matched his DNA.

I smelled him.

I also did that.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

Source: Astonishing X-Men, Volume 1: Gifted

Reading

“A dog can never tell you what she knows from the
smells of the world, but you know, watching her,
that you know
almost nothing.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Dog Songs

World , Dogs

“She gritted her teeth. She was here with Sebastian, on her way to see a powerful warlock, and mentally she was maundering on about the way Jace smelled.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Way

“Coffee. I could smell coffee. Coffee would make everything better.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Every Which Way But Dead

Coffee

“I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That's right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Books , Intelligence , Kiss

“I found the candles—atrocious air freshening ones that smelled like fake pine.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

“I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.”

Tana French book The Likeness

Source: The Likeness

Freedom , Grass

“I'm not so sure about this wind and howling darkness business," Jace went on, "smells more like landfill to me. You sure you're not from Staten Island?”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

Business

“How can you smell this good after the kind of crappy day we've had?"
"I sweat perfume. Like all girls.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Kiss of Death

Girl

“fate is not just whose cooking smells good, but which way the wind blows”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

Fate , Way , Cooking

“A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.”

Norton Juster book The Phantom Tollbooth

Source: The Phantom Tollbooth

“I even love the smell of books.”

Adriana Trigiani (1970) American film director

Love , Books

“In case you're wondering, the underside of a sheep doesn't smell that great. Imagine a winter sweater that's been dragged through the mud and left in the laundry hamper for a week. Something like that.”

Rick Riordan book The Sea of Monsters

Source: The Sea of Monsters

Imagination , Winter

“He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

Sense

“Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

Music , Memory

“Does anyone smell roasting meat?' said Razo, 'Oh, wait, it's just Geric's face.”

Shannon Hale Forest Born

Source: Forest Born

Waiting

“The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.”

Karen Blixen book Out of Africa

Source: Out of Africa

Star , Tear , Grass , Singing

“She smells better," Claire said. "And she made me cookies.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Midnight Alley

“Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.”

John Berger (1926–2017) British painter, writer and art critic

Home , Clothes

“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Understanding , Country

“A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Books

“For a week, almost without speaking,
they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous
reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Light , Universe

“Cloisters, ancient libraries… I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.”

Alan Bennett The History Boys

Source: The History Boys

Learning

“So the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Source: Odes to Common Things

Housing

“Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water.”

Sherwood Smith book Crown Duel

Source: Crown Duel (Crown & Court #1 - 2, 1997)

Reality , Water , Memory , Time

“There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell.”

Haruki Murakami book Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Source: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Death , Way

“Guys can smell desperation. It triggers an instinct in them to run far and fast so they aren't around when a woman starts peeling apart her heart.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

Source: My Fair Godmother

Guy , Heart

“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

“The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

Source: As I Lay Dying

Light , Sun

“And as he held his first true lover against him, feeling that familiar difference in their heights and smelling that wonderful cologne, part of him wanted to debate this break up until they both gave in and kept trying.
But that wasn’t fair.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover at Last

Feeling , Lovers , Parting

“Would I be as strong as that once I did that thing Christophe was talking about? Blooming? Would I smell like a bakery item? Or was that just him? Did he use pie filling for cologne?”

Lilith Saintcrow book Strange Angels

Source: Strange Angels

Strong

“When trees burn, they leave the smell of heartbreak in the air.”

Jodi Thomas (1950) American writer

Source: Welcome to Harmony

Heartbreaking , Tree

“Does koala bear poop smell like cough drops?”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

“Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don't get out much. It's true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well.”

Tom Waits (1949) American singer-songwriter and actor

People , Feeling , Dead

“Poseidon held out his arms and gave me a hug. I realized, a little embarrassed, that I'd never actually hugged my dad before. He was warm—like a regular human—and he smelled of a salty beach and fresh sea air.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

Sea

“By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

Men , World , Way , Learning

“She crawled on top of him, naked and warm and soft, smelling like a miracle that had saved him from a lifetime of aloneness.”

Patricia Briggs book Fair Game

Source: Fair Game

“It's not evil, Rand. I know something evil when I smell it. This isn't evil, it's just incredibly stupid.”

Robert Jordan The Wheel of Time

Source: A Memory of Light

Stupidity , Evil

“I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and… would sit long hours in Bodley's arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.”

Laurie R. King book The Beekeeper's Apprentice

Source: The Beekeeper's Apprentice

Books , Feeling , Lovers

“He could smell her morality, the sweet rot of corruption”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“I don’t like it when you use my shampoo, because then your hair smells like me, not you.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

“He could see the honey, he could smell the honey, but he couldn’t quite reach the honey.”

A.A. Milne book Winnie-the-Pooh

Source: Winnie-the-Pooh

“Freak is easily spooked. Flesh-eating monsters tend to scare him away. So do fireworks, clowns, and the smell of Sadie's weird British Ribena drink. (Can't blame him on that last one. Sadie grew up in London and developed some pretty strange tastes.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Sobek

Source: The Son of Sobek

Drink

“There was that special smell made up of paper, ink, and dust; the busy hush; the endless luxury of thousands of unread books. Best of all was the eager itch of anticipation as you went out the door with your arms loaded down with books.”

Zilpha Keatley Snyder (1927–2014) American writer of children's fiction

Source: The Velvet Room

Books , Business

“I'm not sure you're quite sensible of the honor I'm doing you," Jace said. "you'll be the first mundane who has ever been inside the Institute.""Probably the smell keeps the rest of them away.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“Hear, hear," said the Dog, raising her head. "It's always better to be doing, Prince. Besides, you don't smell like a coward, so you can't be one.”

Garth Nix book Abhorsen

Source: Lirael

Dogs

“Come on, don't you ever stop and smell the coffee?”

Justina Chen (1968) American writer

Source: North of Beautiful

Coffee

“In the past, I had particularly loved her smell. She always smelled freshed, freshly washed or of freshed laundry or fresh sweat or freshly loved”

Bernhard Schlink book The Reader

Source: The Reader

Love , Past

“Hark, now hear the sailors cry,
Smell the sea and feel the sky.
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Into the Mystic
Song lyrics, Moondance (1970)

Feeling , Soul , Cry , Flying

“If it looks like a Dwarf, and it smells like a Dwarf, then it's probably a Dwarf or a latrine wearing dungerees.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Lost Colony

“Each time you look at a tangerine, you can see deeply into it. You can see everything in the universe in one tangerine. When you peel it and smell it, it’s wonderful. You can take your time eating a tangerine and be very happy.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Universe , Time , Happiness

“Come clean with a child heart
Laugh as peaches in the summer wind
Let rain on a house roof be a song
Let the writing on your face
be a smell of apple orchards on late June.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

Source: Honey and Salt

Heart , Summer , Housing

“This new quantum mechanics promised to explain all of chemistry. And though I felt an exuberance at this, I felt a certain threat, too. “Chemistry,” wrote Crookes, “will be established upon an entirely new basis…. We shall be set free from the need for experiment, knowing a priori what the result of each and every experiment must be.” I was not sure I liked the sound of this. Did this mean that chemists of the future (if they existed) would never actually need to handle a chemical; might never see the colors of vanadium salts, never smell a hydrogen selenide, never admire the form of a crystal; might live in a colorless, scentless, mathematical world? This, for me, seemed and awful prospect, for I, at least, needed to smell and touch and feel, to place myself, my senses, in the middle of the perceptual world.”

Oliver Sacks book Uncle Tungsten

Source: Uncle Tungsten (2001), pp. 312–313

World , Color , Feeling , Mathematics

“And just so — if I could, because he insulted a lot of people. I've had more calls on that statement that Ted made — New York is a great place. It's got great people, it's got loving people, wonderful people. When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York. You had two one hundred, you had two 110-story buildings come crashing down. I saw them come down. Thousands of people killed, and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup, probably in the history of doing this, and in construction. I was down there, and I've never seen anything like it. And the people in New York fought and fought and fought, and we saw more death, and even the smell of death — nobody understood it. And it was with us for months, the smell, the air. And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers. And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Full Transcript of the Sixth Republican Debate in Charleston http://time.com/4182096/republican-debate-charleston-transcript-full-text/, Time (14 January 2016).
2010s, 2016, January

Love , Death , People , World

“My father, William C. Boulding, was a working plumber in business for himself. At the back of the house was the yard, a corrugated iron shed full of pipes, wrenches, and blow torches, and other mysterious and rather frightening apparatus. He had two faithful employees, Billy Fox, who was moody and regarded as a little queer, and Billy Sankey, who was short and cheerful. They and my father always smelled strongly of some kind of grease. My father was a gentle man. I never I never heard his voice raised in anger. He had had a very hard childhood. His father died soon after he was born; his mother married again, a man known in the family legends as "Pa Hardacre," about whom endless stories were told. He was a bigamist. He drove my father out of the house at the age of twelve to earn his own living on the streets of Liverpool. He constantly mistreated my half-aunts, Ethel and Rosie. He died before I was born, but my mother's accounts of him sounded like something out of Dickens.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1980s, Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms, 1980, p. 5

Age , Family , Faith , Business

“You can work out in a pool and sweat, but you don't smell. In the water you are weightless. You are ageless. It feels exhilarating to get wet. And you know the water is a very sexy medium. Why do you think people always get in a hot tub?”

Esther Williams (1921–2013) competitive American swimmer and actor

People , Feeling , Thinking , Water

“Your eyes are windows to your dreams; Your ears are windows to your mind; You nose is the door to your heart - you can win over any man with just your smell.”

Siddharth Katragadda (1972) Indian writer

page 34
Dark Rooms (2002)

Dreams , Heart

“His eyes had death in them, his and mine. His belly was bloated and I could smell the stench of a festering wound, the sickening odor of old blood impregnated into cloth. There was a wildness in his face and his mouth was a tight slash that showed all his teeth. Marv Kania was young, but right there he was as old as death itself.”

Mickey Spillane book The Snake

The Snake (1964)

Death , Clothes

“Show me your little poem
and I'll tell you why it wasn't written
any earlier or later than it was.Oh no, you've got me wrong.
Keep your funny piece of paper
with its scribbles.
All I need for my ends
is your layer of dirt
and the long gone
smell of burning.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"Archeology"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The People on the Bridge (1986)

“The development of the human mind has practically extinguished all feelings, except a few sporadic kinds, [like] sound, colors, smells, warmth, etc., which now appear to be disconnected and separate.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Law of Mind (1892)

Color , Feeling , Appearance

“His aunt drily remarked that, at this rate, he would soon get through all the sights; but she could not guess — having lived always in Washington — how little the sights of Washington had to do with its interest.

The boy could not have told her; he was nowhere near an understanding of himself. The more he was educated, the less he understood. Slavery struck him in the face; it was a nightmare; a horror; a crime; the sum of all wickedness! Contact made it only more repulsive. He wanted to escape, like the negroes, to free soil. Slave States were dirty, unkempt, poverty-stricken, ignorant, vicious! He had not a thought but repulsion for it; and yet the picture had another side. The May sunshine and shadow had something to do with it; the thickness of foliage and the heavy smells had more; the sense of atmosphere, almost new, had perhaps as much again; and the brooding indolence of a warm climate and a negro population hung in the atmosphere heavier than the catalpas. The impression was not simple, but the boy liked it: distinctly it remained on his mind as an attraction, almost obscuring Quincy itself. The want of barriers, of pavements, of forms; the looseness, the laziness; the indolent Southern drawl; the pigs in the streets; the negro babies and their mothers with bandanas; the freedom, openness, swagger, of nature and man, soothed his Johnson blood.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Education , Boy , Understanding , Nature

“This bubbling and whirling of forms and lights, composed of sounds, noises, and smells has been partly achieved by me in my 'Anarchical funeral' [the painting Carra painted ca 1910-1911, ed. ].... by Umberto Boccioni in his 'States of Minds' and 'Forces of a Street' [both paintings Boccioni painted in 1911], by Russolo in 'Rebellion' (1911) and Severini in 'Pan-Pan [the first version, Severini painted in 1909-1911], paintings which were violently discussed at our first Paris exhibition in 1912.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

Quote in La Pittura dei suoni, rumori, odori Carrà, 11 Aug 1913, as quoted in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 142
1910's

Light , Painting

“It smells funny, but it works.”

Kerry Jackson

Radio From Hell (April 20, 2006)

“This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and "Lord have mercy upon us" writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell to and chaw, which took away the apprehension.”

Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) English naval administrator and member of parliament

June 7, 1665
Written during the Great Plague.
Diary

Sadness , Housing

“I look at you and see
my life that might have been
your face just ghostly in the smoke.
They're setting fire to the cornfields
as you're taking me home.
The smell of burning fields
will now mean you and here.”

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

Song lyrics, The Sensual World (1989)

Life , Home

“There was a smell in the air now. The hot, close, frightening small of mob; mob excited, hungry, dreaming blood and death. The primitive in Stark knew that sweaty acridity all too well.”

Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: The Ginger Star (1974), Chapter 7 (p. 45)

Death , Dreams

“Gently rising hills block the view into the distance; line the wishes and desires of the children, who enjoy the blissful moments of the present without wanting to know what lies beyond. Bushes in bloom, nourishing herbs, and sweet-smelling flowers surround the quiet clear stream in which the pure blue of the cloudless sky is reflected like the glorious image of God in the souls of the children... There is no stone to be seen here, no withered branch, no fallen leaves. The whole of nature breathes, peace, joy, innocence and life.”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

Quote from Friedrich's Diary entry, written Aug. 1803 at Loschwitz; as cited in Religious Symbolism in Caspar David Friedrich, by Colin J. Bailey https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:1m2225&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS-DOCUMENT.PDF, paper; Oct. 1988 - Edinburgh College of Art, pp. 11-12
Friedrich is describing here his first composition of the painting 'Spring', 1803 (a later version he painted in 1808, viewed and described then by Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert)
1794 - 1840

Life , God , Children , Peace

“Never encourage a man to cook breakfast; it causes him to wonder if women are necessary. If you always get his breakfast and don’t raise controversial issues until after his second cup of coffee, you can get away with murder the rest of the time. They don’t notice other odors when they smell bacon.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Number of the Beast

Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter V : “—a wedding ring is not a ring in my nose—”, p. 41

Women , Coffee , Time , Cooking

“Calica keeps cursing the filth and, whenever he treads on one of the innumerable turds lining the streets, he looks at his dirty shoes instead of at the sky or a cathedral outlined in space. He does not smell the intangible and evocative matter of which Cuzco is made, but only the odor of stew and excrement. It's a question of temperament.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Letter to his mother from Cuzco, Peru (22 August 1953); as quoted in "Making of a Marxist" in The Guardian (16 June 2001) http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,,507694,00.html

Shoe , Question

“Though he had never smelled the death of men before, he knew the smell as if it were a knowledge born into him.”

Robert Olmstead (1954) American writer

Coal Black Horse (2007)

Death , Men , Knowledge

“This book is gaudy like a gilded cauliflower which smells so bad after a good hot water soaking, like hot chocolate sweetened with sugar beet / incompatibles blended incongruously to no purpose.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From the fifth book, "The Book of the Exhibitionist"
The Pillow Book

Books , Water

“Had another dream about the lions at the door
They were not half as frightening as they were before
But I'm thinking about eternity
Some kind'a ecstasy's got a hold on me
Walls, windows, trees, waves coming through
You be in me I'll be in you
Together in eternity
Some kind'a ecstasy's got a hold on me
Up among the firs where it smells so sweet
Or down in the valley were the river used to be
I got my mind on eternity
Some kind'a ecstasy's got a hold on me, and I'm
Wondering where the lions are and I'm
Wondering where the lions are…”

Bruce Cockburn (1945) Canadian folk/rock guitarist and singer-songwriter

Wondering Where the Lions Are, Track 6 (See also:Ottawa Valley and Algonquin Park)
Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws (1979)

Dreams , Thinking , Tree

“We can't smell what The Rock is cookin' at the Palace of Wisdom.”

John Hennigan (1979) American professional wrestler

The Palace Of Wisdom
Variant: We don't like fatties at the Palace of Wisdom.

Wisdom

“Many if not most of Kissinger's partners in crime are now in jail, or are awaiting trial, or have been otherwise punished or discredited. His own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the philosopher Anacharsis, who mantained that laws were like cobwebs; strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

[The Trial of Henry Kissinger, 2002, 1859846319, 46240330, [E840.8.K58 H58 2001]]
2000s, 2002

Justice , Law , Strong , Time

“Jack: Smell?… What do I want with smelling salts?”

Jack Benny (1894–1974) comedian, vaudeville performer, and radio, television, and film actor

The Jack Benny Program (Radio: 1932-1955), The Jack Benny Program (Television: 1950-1965)

“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

“Opening the door to the visiting doctor, all set to apologize for the flour on her hands—she had been baking—Mrs. Byrne sniffed. Smoke! And if she could smell it with her heavy head cold, it must be a tremendous fire!
”We ought to call the brigade!” she exclaimed. “Is it a hayrick?”
”The brigade would have a long way to go,” the doctor told her curtly. “It’s from America. The wind’s blowing that way.””

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

November “THE SMOKE OF THAT GREAT BURNING”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Way

“Before the ferry leaves a horse and wagon comes aboard, a brokendown springwagon loaded with flowers, driven by a little brown man with high cheekbones. Jimmy Herf walks around it; behind the drooping horse with haunches like a hatrack the little warped wagon is unexpectedly merry, stacked with pots of scarlet and pink geraniums, carnations, alyssum, forced roses, blue lobelia. A rich smell of maytime earth comes from it, of wet flowerpots and greenhouses. The driver sits hunched with his hat over his eyes. Jimmy has an impulse to ask him where he is going with all of those flowers, but he stifles it.”

John Dos Passos book Manhattan Transfer

Source: Manhattan Transfer (1925), p. 403

Flowers , Horse

“"No, no no," she said. "You don't understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine … where you couldn't see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn't (not yet) come and I didn't know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

Psyche
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)

Beauty , Home , Mountain , Understanding

“When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people’s souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.”

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

Diary ot a Chambermaid

People , Soul , Tear

“My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.”

Penn Jillette (1955) American magician

As quoted in "Thoughts On the Business of Life" in Forbes magazine (12 November 2007) http://www.forbes.com/business/forbes/2007/1112/192.html
2000s

World

““Are you still afraid?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, “I am thankful. The world has been threatened too long by the extraordinary, the supernatural and the monstrous. I shall be happy enough to smell the pines and hear the song of the thrush. And to be with you, Captain von Bek.”
“The world is still threatened,” I said to her, “but perhaps not by Lucifer. I held her hand tightly.”

Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 18 (p. 166)

World , Happiness

“Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 50

People

“It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secrets of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones that you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

page 229.
The God of Small Things (1997)
Variant: It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secrets of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones that you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic.

Love , Secret , Way , Lovers

“Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.”

James Shirley The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses

sc. iii. Compare: "The sweet remembrance of the just Shall flourish when he sleeps in dust", Tate and Brady, Psalm cxxii.
The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses

“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

“Vlaminck and Utrillo were very good friends, drinking buddies. One day they attend a funeral. They're walking behind the hearse in a procession, and they're having a great time conversing with one another. They are completely engrossed when suddenly one asks the other, 'Say, don't you smell something funny?' They look up and they're walking behind a garbage truck! They'd lost the hearse in the middle of their enthusiastic conversation.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reflections (1981)

Drink , Time

“I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an archangel for the moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth which underlies all human experience, and is the key to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped straggling letters, the all-embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.””

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

Mechanism in thought and morals https://books.google.se/books?id=c5rOGqwLGaEC&lpg=PA47 : an address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, June 29, 1870
Mechanism in thought and morals (1871)

Children , Truth , Smile , Music