Quotes about smell
page 4

“Here, too, was the guide, the beacon, for such times as humanity might be in danger; here was the Guardian of Whom all humans knew — not an exterior force, nor an awesome Watcher in the sky, but a laughing thing with a human heart and a reverence for its human origins, smelling of sweat and new-turned earth rather than suffused with the pale odor of sanctity.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3, p. 186

Time, Heart

“!-- Setting forth once more, embarking upon the search once again: the narrow path that snakes among livid rocks and desolate, camel-colored hills; white houses hanging suspended from cliffs, looking as though they were about to let go and fall on the wayfarer’s head; the smell of sweating hides and cow dung; the buzz of afternoon; the screams of monkeys leaping about amid the branches of the trees or scampering along the flat rooftops or swinging from the railings of a balcony; overhead, birds circling and the bluish spirals of smoke rising from kitchen fires; the almost pink light on the stones; the taste of salt on parched lips; the sound of loose earth slithering away beneath one’s feet; the dust that clings to one’s sweat-drenched skin, makes one’s eyes red, and chokes one’s lungs; i --> Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms — all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet…. The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 1

Color, Search, Bird, Thinking

“To be resign'd when ills betide,
Patient when favours are deni'd,
And pleas'd with favours given,—
Dear Chloe, this is wisdom's part;
This is that incense of the heart
Whose fragrance smells to heaven.”

Nathaniel Cotton (1707–1788) British writer

The Fireside, stanza 11, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "The incense of the heart may rise", Pierpont, Every Place a Temple, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Wisdom, Heart, Parting

“Dwelling beside a body of water is tonic for the weary psyche. Sea smells, sea birds, seawrack, sands—alternately cool, warm, moist and dry—a taste of brine and the presence of the rocking, slopping bluegraygreen spit-flecked waters, has the effect of rinsing the emotions, bathing the outlook, bleaching the conscience.”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 5 (pp. 119-120)

Bird, Water, Sea

“Media people should have long noses like an elephant to smell out politicians, mayors, prime ministers and businessmen. We need to know the reality, the good and the bad, not just the appearance.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

News conference in Vancouver, B.C. as quoted in The Globe and Mail. (8 September 2006) http://web.archive.org/web/20070326201154/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060908.BCDALAILAMA08/TPStory/.

People, Reality, Appearance

“Under a forehead roughly comparable to that of the Javanese or the Piltdown man are visible a pair of tiny pig eyes, lit up alternately by greed and concupiscence. His nose, broken in childhood by a self-inflicted blow with a hockey stick, has a prehensile tip, ever quick to smell out an insult; at the least suspicion of an affront, Perelman, who has the pride of a Spanish grandee, has been known to whip out his sword-cane and hide in the nearest closet.”

S.J. Perelman (1904–1979) American humorist, author, and screenwriter

The Best of S. J. Perelman, Introduction (1947)
The Introduction was written under the name "Sidney Namlerep".

Childhood, Hockey

“At that time my heart was all broke
I looked like ashes and smelled like smoke.
And I turned away from my loving kind
Try to leave my body and live in my mind.
But it's much too much emotion
To hold it in your hand.
They've got waves out on the ocean
They're gonna wear away the land.”

James Taylor (1948) American singer-songwriter and guitarist

"Line 'Em Up"
Song lyrics, Hourglass (1997)

Love, Time, Heart

“A builder. A rough and ready plasterer. A colour grinder. He Courbet is like a Roman bricklayer. And yet he's another true painter. There's no one in this century that surpasses him. Even though he rolls up his sleeves, plugs up his ears, demolishes columns, his workmanship is classical!... His view was always compositional. His vision remained traditional. Like his palette-knife, he used it only out of doors. He was sophisticated and brought his work to a high finish... His great contribution is the poetic introduction of nature - the smell of damp leaves, mossy forest cuttings - into nineteenth century painting; the murmur of rain, woodlands shadows, sunlight moving under trees. The sea. And snow, he painted snow like no one else!”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 198 in: 'What he told me – II. The Louvre'

Nature, Tree, Painting, Sea

“Aristodemus, a friend of Antigonus, supposed to be a cook's son, advised him to moderate his gifts and expenses. "Thy words," said he, "Aristodemus, smell of the apron."”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

44 Antigonus I
Apophthegms of Kings and Great Commanders

Cooking

“In France, too, it is an environment traditionally deployed on the left and it is very chic to be anti-Sarkozy. But the so-called "left-caviar", that snobbish with the smell in the nose, it disgusts me, it's hypocritical.”

Alessandra Martines (1963) Italian dancer and actor

“Now my muff smells like steak.”

Gina Barberi

Radio From Hell (July 13, 2006)

“…you both fail to understand what is happening to you. You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see — and you, looking for destiny! It’s classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the score-card of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less — a black, amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force…”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 3.

God, Truth, Boy, Understanding

“In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.”

W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords

"The Justice of Dame Kind", p. 464
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

Madness

“Desperation is the perfume of the young actor. It's so satisfying to have gotten rid of it. If you keep smelling it, it can drive you crazy. In this business a lot of people go nuts, go eccentric, even end up dead from it. Not my plan.”

Uma Thurman (1970) American actress and model

Interview with Laura Yorke. Reader's Digest. July 2006

People, Business, Dead

“An eye from another world; a smell-detector, investigating the path ahead. We don't often see a snail that way, and that's because we've only recently had the tiny lenses and electronic cameras that we need to explore this miniature world. But when we meet its inhabitants face to face, we suddenly realise that their behaviour can be just as meaningful to us as the behaviour of many animals more our own size.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Opening narration
Life in the Undergrowth (2005)

World, Way, Animals

“Orwell's 1984 refers more directly to contemporary events than does Huxley's book: the narrative takes place in the near rather than the distant future and obviously sets its sights on Stalinism. When I traveled in the communist world before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found that everyone I met who had read the book (clandestinely, of course) expressed immeasurable admiration for it and marveled that a man who had never set foot inside a communist country could not only describe the physical environment so well—the universal smell of cabbage, the grayness of the dilapidated buildings—but also its mental and moral atmosphere. It was almost as if the communist regimes had taken 1984 as a blueprint rather than as a warning.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

The Dystopian Imagination http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2001). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Books, World, Travel, Universe

“As I search the archives of my memory I seem to discern six types or methods which divide themselves from one another with measurable distinctness. There is the type magisterial or imperative; the type laconic or sententious; the type conversational or homely; the type refined or artificial, smelling of the lamp, verging at times upon preciosity or euphuism; the demonstrative or persuasive; and finally the type tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and the pastepot which are its implements and emblem.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge

On types of judicial writing, in "Law and Literature" in Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses (1931), p. 10
Other writings

Home, Search, Memory, Time

“Whoever killed a person having a treaty with the Muslims, shall not smell the smell of Paradise though its smell is perceived from a distance of forty years.”

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

[4, 53, 391]
Sunni Hadith

Personality

“[On what she learned from working on The L Word] I think that I learned the most clearly was how connected we all are. And that (does air quotation marks) "gay issues" are also women's issues because homophobia is a form of misogyny…And I feel much more motivated to speak out when I see something that I don't like or that just smells wrong…I see how all women are connected. You know, and that we are all either repressed or we repress ourselves in certain ways, and that's truly codified within the culture. And that I'm not so far removed from that woman in the Congo who's terrified to go out into the woods to look for firewood.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

New York Times Talks Panel (20 April 2009) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeZgJ3EJrbE.

Women, Way, Feeling, Motivation

“From the point of view of the development of Marx’ s theories, his early journalistic writings are important for two main reasons. In his sharp attacks on the censorship law he spoke out unequivocally for the freedom of the Press, against the levelling effect of government restriction (‘ You don’ t expect a rose to smell like a violet; why then should the human spirit, the richest thing we have, exist only in a single form?’), and also expressed views concerning the whole nature of the state and the essence of freedom. Pointing out that the vagueness and ambiguity of the Press law placed arbitrary power in the hands of officials, Marx went on to argue that censorship was contrary not only to the purposes of the Press, but to tbe nature of the state as such.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume I, The Founders, pp. 120-1

Law, Nature, Freedom

“"All this beauty makes a person realize how insignificant they are," Paul says.
"How insignificant I am. You're the insignificant one"
He grins real big as he realizes how his words sounded. "I didn't mean it like that," he chuckles.
"No, I know what you meant, bud. I was just thinking kind of the same thing. I was looking at all this depth and it came to me how very shallow you are."
"Ha, ha," Paul chortles. He takes a few steps down the trail and turns. "You know, Don, I was just looking at this little flowery cactus here and thinking how nice it looks and it made me realize how ugly you are."
"Is that right," I say. "Well, I was just considering how smart these rocks look and it made me realize how dumb you are." With that I give him a little kick in the backside.
"How smart these rocks are?" he heckles. "Well, I was just looking at that cloud up there, reflecting on its beauty and stuff, and it hit me how much you smell."
"Is that right," I say. "The cloud made you realize that, huh?"
Paul distances himself a little and keeps turning to see if I am going to kick him again. He's got this grin going like he got the last laugh.
"You know, Paul, I was just looking at this pebble and it made me realize that I'm going to tackle you and throw you off the ledge."
"I see. That's real deep, Don. The pebble; you got that from a pebble?"”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

Beauty, Thinking, Personality

“As the only black kid in my primary school playground, animals had become my friends. By 15 I was vegan, although I didn't give up honey until 16. For a while my mother thought it was just "a rasta phase". … I can honestly say I've not been tempted to give up veganism in 27 years. I sometimes smell a chip shop and like the smell but then feel guilty because fish might be part of it. But I'll go home and make vegan chips. After all these years, my favourite food is my mother's butter bean stew with whole potatoes, yam and dasheen. I don't think I've ever made a meal for her, to be honest. I think she would consider it a failing of her motherhood and say "Boy, get out the kitchen."”

Benjamin Zephaniah (1958) English poet and author

"Interview: Benjamin Zephaniah" by John Hind, TheGuardian.com (18 July 2010) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/18/benjamin-zephaniah-life-on-a-plate.

School, Food, Feeling, Home

“So I departed, leaving behind a pungent smell of brimstone. Just something to remember me by.”

Jonathan Stroud book The Amulet of Samarkand

Closing lines.
The Amulet of Samarkand (2003)

“Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive or be he dead
I'll have his bones to grind my bread.”

Joseph Jacobs book English Fairy Tales

said by the ogre or giant. Now rendered as I'll grind his bones to make my bread.
English Fairy Tales (1890), Preface to English Fairy Tales, Jack and the Beanstalk

Dead

“I haven't the arrogance to say I can carry the mighty load of His Cross, but I do try to walk in its shadow. He wants to carve your life like a crucifix. Every calamity is a crucifixion, crucifying your ambition, your lust. Each is a tiny lesson, and then the imprint of the crucifixion is on your life. What is your plan of sacrifice today? You and I, petty souls, sacrifice for our children. Christ sacrificed for tomorrow's whole world. Whenever I see slum-dwellers, with their hunger and poverty, that obscene poverty, I feel He is crucified like that. When I come across a person suffering from leprosy, foul smelling, ulcerous, I can see the imprint of His lips, His kiss. What did they not do to sufferers of leprosy in His time, yet the carpenter's son cared for them and touched them. That hand is an emblem for me, that hand which cared for the loneliest and the lost. The Christian is … he who not only lights the darkest corner in the world but also the darkest corner in his own heart.”

Baba Amte (1914–2008) Indian freedom fighter, social worker

On Christ
Baba Amte's Words of Wisdom

Life, Hunger, Children, World

“Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines, st. 1 (1934), st. 5

Secret, Light, Sun

“Karma is the enjoyment of appropriate objects by the five senses of hearing, feeling, seeing, tasting and smelling, assisted by the mind together with the soul. The ingredient in this is a peculiar contact between the organ of sense and its object, and the consciousness of pleasure which arises from that contact is called Kama.”

Vātsyāyana Indian logician

Source: The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana: Translated from the Sanskrit. In seven parts, with preface, introduction, and concluding remarks http://books.google.com/books?id=-ElAAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA18, Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, 1883, P. 17

Pleasure, Feeling, Soul, Sense

“Let's face it; regular monthly superhero comic books have taken on the look and smell of old men's pants. It's hardly a surprise comics lost the teenage audience or that the adult audience is now bored and irritated by the endless recycling of images they've already seen and words they've already read.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2003
http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=36&t=001597
On comics

Men, Books, Reading

“138. Well may hee smell fire whose gowne burnes.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

““I know it stinks. The whole universe stinks, sometimes. Haven’t you discovered that yet?”
“It doesn’t have to stink!” Rawlins said sharply, his voice rising. “Is that the lesson you’ve learned in all those years? The universe doesn’t stink. Man stinks! And he does it by voluntary choice because he’d rather stink than smell sweet! We don’t have to lie. We don’t have to cheat. We could opt for honor and decency and—” Rawlins stopped abruptly. In a different tone he said, “I sound young as hell to you, don’t I, Charles?”
“You’re entitled to make mistakes,” Boardman said. “That’s what being young is for.”
“You genuinely believe and know that there’s a cosmic malevolence in the workings of the universe?”
Boardman touched the tips of his thick, short fingers together. “I wouldn’t put it that way. There’s no personal power of darkness running things, any more than there’s a personal power of good. The universe is a big impersonal machine. As it functions it tends to put stress on some of its minor parts, and those parts wear out, and the universe doesn’t give a damn about that, because it can generate replacements. There’s nothing immoral about wearing out parts, but you have to admit that from the point of view of the part under stress it’s a stinking deal.””

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 4, section 3 (p. 72)

Lie, Way, Hell, Learning

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

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 32 (p. 269)

Love, Books, Parting

“There [is] no little vigour and force added to words, when they are delivered in a neat and fine way, and somewhat out of the ordinary road, common and dull language relishing more of the clown than the gentleman. But herein also affectation must be avoided; it being better for a man by a native and clear eloquence to express himself, than by those words which may smell either of the lamp or inkhorn.”

Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) Anglo-Welsh soldier, diplomat, historian, poet and religious philosopher

Source: The Autobiography, Pp. 35-6

Way

“Widows are far better than brides. They don't tell, they won't yell, they don't swell, they rarely smell, and they're grateful as hell.”

Robert A. Heinlein book To Sail Beyond the Sunset

Source: To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987), p. 305 (1988 Ace reprint; ISBN 9780441748600)

Hell

“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

“How many powerful memories are triggered by smell and taste? Your mother’s old perfume, the smell your father’s breath, the taste of the soap they’d make you eat.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Memory

“Perfume; Any smell that is used to drown a worse one.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927)

“I don't know whether you find also in your part of the world that there are certain people who go zealously snuffing about to smell out moral corruption, and, as soon as they have found some, put the person concerned into some lucrative position where they can keep their eye on him. Healthy natures are left out in the cold.”

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet

Dr. Rank, Act I
A Doll's House (1879)

People, World, Nature, Parting

“We live with [our defects] as we do with the perfumes that we wear, we do not smell them; they only incommode others.”

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert (1647–1733) writer from France

Source: A Mother's Advice to Her Daughter, 1728, p. 195

“I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It's broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have? And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is that quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. Its half atheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love. Your kind of picknose love.”

Ernest Hemingway book To Have and Have Not

Helen Gordon to her husband Richard Gordon in Ch. 21
To Have and Have Not (1937)

Love, Life, Happiness, Lie

“The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.”

Seamus Heaney book Death of a Naturalist

"Digging", line 25, from Death of a Naturalist (1966).
Poetry Quotes, Death of a Naturalist

Men

“When you have a full bouquet you can't sit back and smell each flower.”

Avner Strauss (1954) Israeli musician

Artist Pages.

Flowers

“With all your music, loud and lustily,
With every dainty joy of sight and smell,
Prepare a banquet meet to entertain
The Lord of Thunder, that hath set you free
From old oppression.”

Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) British poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher

Sylphs
Poems (1851), Prometheus

Music, Joy

“Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like sheep, was the sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy's hearing aid, and when the sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a cup of coffee.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

Page 50
Trout Fishing In America

Guy, Flowers, Coffee, Sun

“Storms in the forest have a more primal character than storms playing over tamed urban land. A vigorous cloudburst is exhilarating, a burst of sensory delight with its leafy smells, gray light, and chill. But a full tree-ripping storm pushes the senses beyond exhilaration or thrill, into fear.”

David G. Haskell (1950) writer, Biologist

"November 21st — Twigs," page 218 The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature http://theforestunseen.com/ (2012)

Fear, Sense, Tree, Light

“Senators leap up and bray for the Death Penalty with inflexible authority of virus yen… Death for dope fiends, death for sex queens (I mean friends) death for the psychopath who offends the cowed and graceless flesh with broken animal innocence of lithe movements. The black wind of death undulates over the land, feeling, smelling for the crime of separate life, movers of the fear-frozen flesh shivering under a vast probability curve… Populations blocks disappear in a checker game of genocide… Any number can play…”

William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch

Atrophied Preface
Naked Lunch (1959)

Life, Death, Fear, Penalty

“I smell a rat.”

Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) English playwright and poet

Blurt, Master-Constable (c. 1601), Act iii. Sc. 3. Compare: "I smell a rat", Ben Jonson, Tale of a Tub, act iv. Sc. 3; Samuel Butler, Hudibras, part i. canto i. line 281; "I begin to smell a rat", Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, book iv. chap. x.

“He that hath eaten a bear-pie, will always smell of the garden.”

James Howell (1594–1666) Anglo-Welsh historian and writer

English Proverbs (1659)

“This use of animal terms to vilify and dehumanize the victims, combined with the abominably degraded conditions in the camps, made it easier for the SS to do their job, since treating prisoners like animals made them begin to look and smell like animals.”

Charles Patterson (author) (1935) American author and historian

Source: Eternal Treblinka (2002), p. 47

Animals

“The difference between me and Bono is that he's quite happy to go and flatter people to get what he wants and he's very good at it, but I just can't do it. I'd probably end up punching them in the face rather than shaking their hand, so it's best that I stay out of their way. I can't engage with that level of bullshit. Which is a shame, really, and in a way it would help if I could, but I just can't. I admire the fact that Bono can, and can walk away from it smelling of roses.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

source http://www.licc.org.uk/culture/thom-yorke-interview

Happiness, People, Way, Help

“The two young men turned and they didn't smile because they were Woody Ballinger's two boys, Carl and Sammy, and for one brief instant, there was something in their faces that didn't belong in that atmosphere of joviality and the little move they instinctively made that shielded them behind the others in back of them was involuntary enough to stretch a tight-lipped grin across my face that told them I could know.
Could.
From away back out of the years I got that feeling across my shoulders and up my spine that said things were starting to smell right and if you kept pushing the walls would go down and you could charge in and take them all apart until there was nothing left but the dirt they were made of.”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

Survival...Zero! (1970)

Men, Smile, Feeling, Boy

“Quoth Hudibras, "I smell a rat!
Ralpho, thou dost prevaricate."”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto I, line 821
Source: Hudibras, Part I (1663–1664)

“I won't die, eaten alive," he said. He put a fresh clip in his gun. I'll do you first if you want, or you can do it yourself.
Save your bullets, Edward. I lifted a can of gasoline in one hand.
What are you planning? he asked.
I'm going to set the shed on fire. I splashed gasoline on the door. The smell was sharp and tugged at the back of my throat.
With us inside? he asked.
Yes.
I'd rather shoot myself, if it's all the same to you.”

Laurell K. Hamilton (1963) Novelist

Edward and Anita
Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, Guilty Pleasures (1993)

“Creosote has a pretty technological smell.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

1960s, Presidential Address, 1969

“I got a phone call from Ricky Martin's management asking me if I'd like to do something with him in Florida around the winter music conference. My answer is as follows: 'I would consider doing something with Ricky Martin if and only if he publicly apologizes for performing at George W's inauguration and if he confirms that when he danced next to George W. Bush at the inauguration he could smell brimstone and that George W. Bush is in fact the spawn of Satan. So if Ricky Martin goes on national television to confirm that George W. is the spawn of Satan then I will perform with him. Otherwise no deal. And only if we can do a cover of 'In a Gadda-da-vida', but The Simpsons version, 'In the garden of Eden' (to which reverend Lovejoy responds ""that sounds like rock and or roll""). And, by the way, I'm a pretty easygoing young-ish person, so if you ever see me walking down the street just stop me and say hello. We're all in the same boat, right? of course you'll have to make it past my phalanx of security guards who are all ex-NFL linebackers, and the cadre of dobermans, and the perma-moat that I wear that's filled with electric eels and vicious sea monkeys. So if you see me just come and say hi. I'm normal.”

Moby (1965) Activist, American musician, DJ and photographer

"predictions" http://www.moby.com/journal/2001-02-15/predictions.html, journal entry (15 February 2001) at Moby's website, moby.com http://www.moby.com/

Music, Way, Winter, Past

“Politics in America is still different from politics anywhere else because the politics has arisen out of the immediate needs, ambitions, and cupidities of the people, that our politics still smell of the bedroom and the kitchen, rather than having descended to us from the chill punctilio of aristocratic negotiation.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

People

“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

“My mum went and married a really horrible horrible man, who drove a taxi at night and had a sticky-fingered son and he smoked cigars in the toilet. Smelled terrible! Again, there's no therapy, there's no counseling over the whole situation! Just married the maniac. And there was a new person in her bed now, and I couldn't do my nightly performance anymore. I was nine years old and my show had been canceled!”

Tracey Ullman (1959) English-born actress, comedian, singer, dancer, screenwriter, producer, director, author and businesswoman

Tracey Ullman: Live and Exposed (2005)

Personality, Night

“Van Gogh is congenial to me, 'Vincent' in his letters. Perhaps nature does have something. There is no need, after all, to speak of the smell of earth; it has too peculiar a savor. The words we use to speak about it, I mean, have too peculair a savor. Too bad that the early Van Gogh was so fine a human being, but not so good as a painter, and that the later, wonderful artist is such a marked man. A mean should be found between these four points pf comparison: then, yes!”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1908), # 808, in The Diaries of Paul Klee; University of California Press, 1964; as quoted by Francesco Mazzaferro, in 'The Diaries of Paul Klee - Part Three' : Klee as a Secessionist and a Neo-Impressionist Artist http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2015/05/paul-klee-ev.html 1903 - 1910

Nature

“The Devil is right at home. The Devil, the Devil himself, is right in the house.
And the Devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the Devil came here. Right here. [crosses himself] And it smells of sulphur still today.
Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the Devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Speech at the U.N. in which he referred to George W. Bush as the Devil, (September 2006), as quoted in "Chavez's colourful quotations" at BBC News (12 November 2007) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7090600.stm 2006

World, Home, Housing

“Before you cut me off, Raven, the reason I hate you, the reason in my heart of hearts why I hate you, is I did not know any better when I was a little kid. When my dad came home smelling like beer. I thought it was a hard day’s work he was doing. I did not realize he was out at a bar. I did not realize ‘work’ meant ‘unemployment office.’ I did not think it was strange for someone to come home and take an Old Style up into the shower. I did not think it was strange for somebody to pass out. I thought an Old Style, a pack a day, was the norm. Raven, my father is exactly like you. Since day one of Ring of Honor, where fighting spirit is supposed to be revered, things are not supposed to be this way! I’d shake your hand like a normal man, but the thing is, I don’t respect you! I hate you! I hate you for everything you have pissed away! Everything I have scrapped and clawed for that I haven’t even earned yet! That you got handed to you and you flushed down the toilet! For what? For pills? For booze? For alcohol? For women? I’m born of your poison society. So, on the seventeenth of July, I will become a monster to fight the monsters of the world! Your time in Ring of Honor will be done. That is a promise. This is true! This is real! This is straight edge!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

Ring of Honor: WrestleRave '03. June 28th, 2003.
Promo aimed at Raven after a tag team match with Colt Cabana against Raven and Christopher Daniels
Ring of Honor

Women, Hate, Alcohol, World

“West of the Amphitheatre, railroad sidings seemed to continue on for miles, accompanied by those same massive low sheds larger than armories, with pens for tens of thousands of frantic beasts, cattle, sheep, and pigs, animals in an orgy of gorging and dropping and waiting and smelling blood. In the slaughterhouses, during the day, a carnage worthy of the Disasters of War took place each morning and afternoon.”

Norman Mailer book Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Pt. 2, p. 86
Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)

War, Waiting, Animals

“It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 10 “Conversations in Mishnory” (p. 143)

“Certainly, Vollard, but listen: will you have a special dish without butter prepared for me? Mind you, no flowers on the table, and you must have dinner at half past seven sharp. I know you won't have your cat around and please don't allow anybody to bring a dog. And if there are to be any women I hope they won't come reeking of perfume. How horrible all those odors are when there are so many things that really smell good, like toast - or even manure! Ah - (a short hesitation), and very few lights. My eyes, you know, my poor eyes!”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

"Early Encounters" (p. 20)
Quoted by Vollard who came to invite Degas for dinner, that evening
posthumous quotes, Degas: An Intimate Portrait' (1927)

Women, Dogs, Hope, Cats

“The senses (the organs of sight, sound, taste, smell, temperature, and touch) are the guardians of the body, and whatever appears good to these sentinels is instantly desired, and ordinarily such things tend to the preservation and furtherance of the welfare of the body, but we choose them simply because they appear pleasing and not for ulterior ends.”

Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955) President of Northwestern university and psychologist

Source: The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice, 1908, p. 154

Sense, Appearance

“Fee, fi, fo, fum
I smell the blood of some earthly one.”

Joseph Jacobs book English Fairy Tales

said by a giant, see Jack and the Beanstalk above.
English Fairy Tales (1890), Preface to English Fairy Tales, Molly Whuppie

“You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is? One thing. You can do anything, the Left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, so long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it's perfectly fine. Whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there's no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

" Limbaugh: The Left Sends Out "The Rape Police" Whenever There's Sex With "No Consent" (Also Known As Rape) http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/10/12/limbaugh-left-sends-out-rape-police-whenever-theres-sex-no-consent-also-known-rape/213787", Media Matters (October 12, 2016).

Sex, Understanding, Sense, Parting

“I consider my selfbeing … that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola

““Tell me about the city, then.”
The master shrugged. “It’s crowded. It smells. There are lots of things to buy.””

Ellen Kushner book The Privilege of the Sword

Part II, Chapter III (p. 140)
The Privilege of the Sword (2006)

“When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara.”

Frederik Pohl book Gateway

Gateway (1978)

Love, Hate, Way, Personality

“Another hallway led to a green steel door. "This is the execution chamber," the officer said. "The day of the execution, we take the man through this door." He opened the green door, and we blinked at the bright lights inside. A big chair filled the room. I could smell leather. "All right, boys," he said. "Line up." The kids made a straight line that led out the green door, then moved ahead, one at a time, to sit in the big wooden chair. "This is the electric chair, Tommy Ray," my dad explained. "It's where murderers are executed." The boys inched forward. Some sat longer in the chair than others. Executed meant killed, that much I knew. "This is the ultimate consequence for the ultimate act of evil," my father told the troop. When all the boys had sat in the chair, it was my turn. I reached up and felt the smooth wood, the leather straps with cold metal buckles. There was a black steel cap dangling up there like a lamp without a bulb. "Up you go, Tommy Ray," Dad said, hoisting me into the chair. The boys were staring at me. But I wasn't even a little bit afraid. My father stood right beside me. I could feel his warm hand next to the cool metal buckle. As the school bus rumbled out of the prison parking lot that afternoon, I stared back at the high walls. I had learned another important lesson. A consequence was what followed what you did. If you did good things, you'd be rewarded with further good things. If you broke the law, you'd have to pay the price. I have never forgotten that lesson.”

Tommy Franks (1945) United States Army general

Source: American Soldier (2004), p. 8

School, Law, Feeling, Boy

““You know the answers, but just between ourselves, that sketch smells a bit. It’s sloppy.”
“I never did have any artistic talent,” Art said defensively. “I’d rather take a photograph any day.”
“You’ve taken too many photographs, maybe. As for artistic talent, I haven’t any either, but I learned to sketch. Look, Art—the rest of you guys get this, too—if you can’t sketch, you can’t see. If you really see what you’re looking at, you can put it down on paper, accurately. If you really remember what you have looked at, you can sketch it accurately from memory.”
“But the lines don’t go where I intend them to.”
“A pencil will go where you push it. It hasn’t any life of its own. The answer is practice and more practice and thinking about what you are looking at. All of you lugs want to be scientists. Well, the ability to sketch accurately is as necessary to a scientist as his slipstick. More necessary, you can get along without a slide rule.””

Robert A. Heinlein book Rocket Ship Galileo

Source: Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), Chapter 10, “The Method of Science”, p. 108

Life, Art, Guy, Thinking

“Bend close! You will smell the lily fragrance of love, the stench of lust, now odors as exquisite as the very spirit of violets, and now such nauseous repulsions as words cannot tell.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Love

“The room smelled like a gust of wind from Satan's anus.”

Anthony Bourdain (1956–2018) Chef and food writer

No Reservations - Iceland.

“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

“Art thou angry with him whose arm-pits stink? art thou angry with him whose mouth smells foul? What good will this anger do thee?”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book V, 28

Art, Anger

“And the same applies to the spouse. You know you love them, but you need to say it again and again. Like we got to the food, moments ago, and you need to say: "This food is – mashallah – it's really, really great". Even if the salt is a little bit more. Because sometimes, as I was saying, she spent so much time bringing it in front of us – and we are worried about how it's smelling, number one, and number two is we say, as we taste it, "The salt is too much, no?" What are you talking about? She just looks at you and her face flops. «I've been at it for three hours here, four hours I've been busy with this for so many months…» And what does she even say? "Next time I'll try a bit harder" – that's if she's a good woman; if not, she will say: "Never gonna cook this again!" It's typical. And if you have someone who is very witty: "The next time there's salt to be put in, I'll call you to put it." So we need to praise the cooking of our wives, we need to praise their dress code, especially… For example, I can let you know something that has worked, for some people. When you find some women, you know, they don't like to dress appropriately, so the husband sometimes wants to tell them something. There're two, three ways of doing it. You can either say, "This is very bad, I don't want you to wear this." And, you know, you might have a response. But if you want a response from the heart, what you do is, you tell them: "The other dress looked much better than this." You see, so you are praising one thing, and that praise is not there when the other thing is there. So, you have told them, in a way, that «this is what I really love». And go beyond the limits in praise – that's your wife, don't worry, you can say whatever you want, mashallah, in terms of goodness. Like the food, when you eat, even if it is a little bit this way or that way, just praise it, mashallah. See what it is. Praise the effort, at least. Let me tell you what has happened once. They say the imam in the mosque had said: "You need to praise the cooking of your wife". Just like I said now. So the man went home, and he had this meal, and he was looking at it, and looking at his wife, and smiling, all happy, mashallah, excited and everything. And when he finishes, he says: "Oh! It was awesome!" And the wife says, "What? I've been cooking for you for 21 years, you never said that! Today, when the food came from the neighbor, you want to say it was awesome?"”

Ismail ibn Musa Menk (1975) Muslim cleric and Grand Mufti of Zimbabwe.

"The Fortunate Muslim Family: Divine Solution to the Fragmented Family" (20 February 2012), lecture at the University of Malaya ( YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QaeZcV_azE) Lectures

Love, Women, Happiness, People