Quotes about smell
page 7

“He was only ten. It seemed to him that he could see them, the two of them, shadowy in the limbo from which time emerged and became time: the old bear absolved of mortality and himself who shared a little of it. Because he recognised now what he had smelled in the huddled dogs and tasted in his own saliva, recognised fear as a boy, a youth recognises the existence of love and passion and experience which is his heritage but not yet his patrimony, from entering by chance the presence of perhaps even merely the bedroom of a woman who has loved and been loved by many men.”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

The Bear section 1 (p. 195)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

Love, Men, Youth, Fear

“At first the child is amused by his anus and feces, and gaily inserts his finger into the orifice, smelling it, smearing feces on the walls, playing games of touching objects with his anus, and the like. This is a universal form of play that does the serious work of all play: it reflects the discovery and exercise of natural bodily functions; it masters an area of strangeness; it establishes power and control over the deterministic laws of the natural world; and it does all this with symbols and fancy. With anal play the child is already becoming a philosopher of the human condition. But like all philosophers he is still bound by it, and his main task in life becomes the denial of what the anus represents: that in fact, he is nothing but body so far as nature is concerned. Nature’s values are bodily values, human values are mental values, and though they take the loftiest flights they are built upon excrement, impossible without it, always brought back to it. As Montaigne put it, on the highest throne in the world man sits on his arse. Usually this epigram makes people laugh because it seems to reclaim the world from artificial pride and snobbery and to bring things back to egalitarian values. But if we push the observation even further and say men sit not only on their arse, but over a warm and fuming pile of their own excrement—the joke is no longer funny. The tragedy of man’s dualism, his ludicrous situation, becomes too real. The anus and its incomprehensible, repulsive product represents not only physical determinism and boundness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

The Recasting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic Ideas
The Denial of Death (1973)

Life, Death, Men, Fate

“That night’s selection was called Windblown Grass. It didn’t exactly smell like grass to Holden, but it was nice. Just a hint of earthiness to it. Holden had a suspicion that all perfumes were named randomly, anyway.”

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

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 53 (p. 579)

Grass, Night

“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

Dreams, Angels, Cars, Tree

“Paddy dashed back towards his goal like a woman who smells a cake burning. The ball won the race and it curled inside the near post as Paddy crashed into the outside of the net and lay against it like a fireman who had returned to find his station ablaze.”

Con Houlihan (1925–2012) Irish sportswriter

The Evening Press, 25 September 1978. As reprinted https://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/con-houlihan-paddy-dashed-back-to-his-goal-like-a-woman-who-smells-a-cake-burning--26885274.html in the Irish Independent following Houlihan's death.

“It is an amazing thing that our memory best retains images of great philosophers when their lives were coming to an end. Socrates raising the chalice with hemlock to his mouth, Seneca whose veins were opened by a slave (there is a painting of this by Rubens), Descartes roaming cold palace rooms with a foreboding that his role of teacher of the Swedish Queen would be his last, old Kant smelling a grated horseradish before his daily walk (the cane preceding him, sinking deeper and deeper into the sand), Spinoza consumed by tuberculosis and patiently polishing lenses, so weak he is unable to finish his Treatise on the Rainbow.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Zbigniew Herbert, Spinoza's Bed [original in Polish]
G - L

Teachers, Memory, Painting

“I began to worship pubic hair, to touch it, to smell it, to lick it. This was when I came to realize that pubic hair wasn’t at all like the hair we had on our heads. No, pubic hair was tougher, coarse, and sharp. You could cut your tongue on it if you licked it too hard. The hair on our heads wasn’t just finer but also round, and our pubic hair was thicker and flat, and so this was why it could cut you if you weren’t careful.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“Mr Bachchan smells so nice that I can smell him from a good distance.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

His co-artist quoted in Jiah Khan, Amitabh Bachchan's 'Lolita', who never topped that role, 5 June 2013, 15 December 2013, Indian Express http://www.indianexpress.com/news/jiah-khan-amitabh-bachchans-lolita-who-never-topped-that-role/1125093/, <br class="br">About Amitabh Bachhan

“I paced up and down the little room, a queer thing happened. It was as though my wandering imagination came upon a new quality, different from all that I had ever known; yet one which was also more familiar and intimate than the smell of Plaxy in the mood of love, more piercing sweet than bitches, more hunt-worthy than the trail of a fox.”

Olaf Stapledon book Sirius

Sirius (1944)

Love, Making love, Imagination, Mood

“Go to Old Delhi, behind the Jama Masjid, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench—the stench of terrified, feathered flesh. On the wooden desk above this coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the flesh and organs of recently chopped-up chicken, still oleaginous with a coating of dark blood. The roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they’re next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop.The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.”

Aravind Adiga book The White Tiger

The Fifth Night.
The White Tiger (2008)

Color, Way, Lying, Country

“Martinez finished a stained window; inventing a tropical Deco, I can almost smell that he is from South America and has the tropics in his spirit.”

Santiago Martínez Delgado (1906–1954) Colombian Muralist, Painter and Illstrator

Frank Lloyd Wright
letter to Tafel 1932, SUNY library Collection
About Martinez

“Aged Totaram Ji died without suffering. He was an ornament to the Sabramati Ashram. He was not a scholar, yet he was wise. He was a collector of bhajans, but not a scholar of music. With his single-wired instrument he used to charm the people of the ashram. Just as he was, so was his wife. But Totaram died first! Wherever people have gathered, there are conflicts. I do not remember any single incident in which this couple participated, or were in any way the cause. Totaram loved the earth. The fields were his life. He came to the ashram years ago and did not ever leave. They found unfailing encouragement from him. He was a strong Hindu, but his heart was equally disposed towards Hindus, Muslims, and those of other faiths. On him was not even the smell of untouchability, and he had no vices at all. He took no part in politics. Still, his love for his country was strong enough to stand any comparison. Renunciation was easy for him. He adored the ashram.”

Totaram Sanadhya (1876–1947) Fijian writer

Mohandas Gandhi, quoted in T. Sanadhya, My Twenty-One Years in the Fiji Islands (English translation by J.D. Kelly & U.K. Singh, Fiji Museum, 1991), pp. 5-6 http://au.geocities.com/fibiographies/S/SText/TotaramSanadhya.htm.

Love, Life, People, Age

“Because he loves pussy. Except it smells like fish!”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

Is... Not Nicole Kidman (2005)

Love, Making love, Fish

“You’d be alone in the kitchen and twilight would be dwindling, and you could hear the far off cries of the other children playing nearby. You’d be alone in the kitchen because it was your special treat time, where the jelly would come out just for you, and your mother would appear at your side just as a vision of Laura Ashley print dress, smelling of magnolias and biscuits and put the jelly in front of you, and you would pull your chair in. Then the old fashioned bar of ice cream would come down, the one that had to be cut with a breadknife before the two sides were flanked with wafers. You would lift your little spoon up excitedly and winkle out that first divet of black jelly… AND THEN THE CAGE COMES DOWN! The cage with the Japanese fighting spiders inside, your mother strikes a match off her forearm and tells you to dance in the front room for money… You, you never forget that shit, I mean it never goes away.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Like, Totally (2006)

Money, Children, Fashion, Appearance

“Well I’m here, you know? Your house is a medley of disgusting smells, there’s nothing to eat, everybody’s wearing bathrobes, there’s no bar, I can’t fuck anybody. Why am I here?”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On young male single friends attending baby shower.
Like, Totally (2006)

Housing

“The death of John Barrymore made us think again for a minute of F. Scott Fitzgerald. They were very different men: a lot alike. Undoubtedly, they both worked hard, but there was the same sense of a difficult technique easily mastered (too easily perhaps); there was the same legend of great physical magnetism, working incessantly for its own destruction; there was the same need for public confession, either desperate or sardonic; and there was always a good deal of time wasted, usually accompanied by the sweet smell of grapes. We have seen Scott Fitzgerald when everything he said was a childish parody of his own talent, and the last time we saw John Barrymore he was busy with a sick and humiliating parody of his. The similarity probably ends there. Up to the day he died, we believe, Fitzgerald still kept his original and eager devotion to his profession, along, we like to think, with the strict confidence that he might still achieve the strict perfection that was so often almost his. Barrymore, on the other hand, had given up long ago.”

John Barrymore (1882–1942) American actor of stage, screen and radio

Wolcott Gibbs, Season in the Sun (1951)

Death, Men, Confidence, Business

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.”

Eudora Welty book One Writer's Beginnings

One Writer's Beginnings(1984)

Love, People, Books, Making love

“Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Feeling, Soul, Joy

“The disembarkation was a fucking shambles and we only took Alexandria as quick as we did to get a fucking drink somewhere, because we were near dead with the thirst…. The town was full of a lot of half-starved blacks, near-blacks you could call them, in filthy rags, raising their hands to the bloody burning heavens when they saw us come in, shouting Allah Allah and so on. Some old bints with veils on gave us fucking filthy water to drink, but filthy or not it was like elation and ecstasy and so on. There was hardly a solitary fucking thing worth having in the whole town, all half-starved goats and so on, and talk about the fucking heat and the smell. Anyway, what they called sheiks came and gave him the keys, and the officers did all right with like knives and scimitars with jewels on, but then we had to move on to Damanhur and Rahmaniya and so on, near dropping with the fucking heat….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Drink, Water, Dead

“Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.”

Walker Percy book The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

Men, God, People, Fear

“Money does not smell.”

Vespasian (9–79) Emperor of Ancient Rome, founder of the Flavian dynasty

Chmaber's Dictionary of Quotations, p. 879-880, attributed "His son Titus had objected to a tax on the contents of the city's urinals (used by fullers). Quoted in Suetonius Vespasian, chapter 23.

Money

“And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Dreams, Birth, Solitude, Tree

“Perfume is a good example of a product gone all wrong. When I was a child, it was a semi-exotic thing and it was called something stupid like "Fleur de Fleur" and you would give it to your mother or aunty at Christmas and it was advertised by some dopey looking woman in a field of sunflowers and she looked like she'd been hit by a tractor because she was going *flails with arms*. She couldn’t just get over how nice she smelled. Now, because we’re so jaded, we’ve consumed so much, our attention can only be grabbed in a violent way. So it’s always advertised by these constipated, exo-keletal bitches who are sneering at you and it’s called something horrible like "Homicide"! "Dysentery!"”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

"Urban Dysentery" for boys and girls!

On consumerism.
What It Is (2009)

Stupidity, Way, Christmas, Bitch

“You know the sad thing is, most people are subliminally coerced into being so many things other than themselves. It sort of has the effect of carbon monoxide. You can’t see it, smell it, it’s completely undetectable until you’re visibly affected. I believe a lot of mental health issues arises from this. We are subconsciously being forced into a uniformed lifestyle when it’s not our nature. And they’ll have us believe that we’re insane when everything in our being fights for its freedom. I will forever remain an eleutheromaniac! So I guess I will forever remain strange or imbalanced or mentally disturbed, because I am mentally disturbed by these conditions and I will never stop fighting for my freedom-mind, body and spirit. If insanity is, in fact, repeating the same things over and over expecting different results, then what does that say about your routined life?”

Scarlet Jei Saoirse (1984) American singer and actress

Life, People, Health, Sadness

“The relationship between a woman and a man is built on the basis of mutual respect .. The woman is not required to bury herself in life because the man is unable to control his instincts like animals .. The woman raises the man's face, hair, height, width, smell, and even the voice of her is roughened, but the woman has learned to control her instincts. The man is also required to rise to the level of the woman.”

Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000) Tunisian politician

Life, Learning, Animals

“And the air was full of the smell of burning bridges.”

Larry Niven book Protector

Section 2, Vandervecken (p. 166)
Protector (1973)

“Be scared. You can't help that. But don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

"The Bear” in The Saturday Evening Post (9 May 1942)

Help, Hurt

“For the man crucified on the crossed machine guns
Without name, without resurrection, without stars,
His dark head heavy with death and his flesh long sour
With the smell of his many prisons — John Smith, John Doe,
John Nobody — oh, crack your mind for his name!
Faceless as water, naked as the dust,
Dishonored as the earth the gas-shells poison
And barbarous with portent.
This is he.
This is the man they ate at the green table
Putting their gloves on ere they touched the meat.
This is the fruit of war, the fruit of peace,
The ripeness of invention, the new lamb,
The answer to the wisdom of the wise.
And still he hangs, and still he will not die
And still, on the steel city of our years
The light falls and the terrible blood streams down.”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Source: Litany for Dictatorships (1935)

Death, Wisdom, War, Peace

“Somebody once said that a wedding is a funeral where you can smell your own flowers. Well, that's a harsh judgement in my book. I prefer to see it as a sexual relationship that is recognised by the police.”

John Cooper Clarke (1951) English performance poet

Series 1 - Twisted Romance (2 Nov 2016)
BBC Radio 4 - Dr John Cooper Clarke at the BBC (Nov 2016)

Books, Flowers, Wedding

“I love simplicity, I like people who know how to listen to music with their heart, feel the smells of life, capture their soul. Because there is truth there, there is sweetness... there is still love.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Amo la semplicità, mi piacciono le persone che sanno ascoltare musica con il cuore, sentire gli odori della vita, catturarne l'anima. Perché lì c'è verità, c'è dolcezza... lì c'è ancora amore.
Source: prevale.net

Love, Life, People, Truth

“Overall there is a smell of fried onions”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Claimed to be written by James while intoxicated by nitrous oxide. Does not appear in his essay Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide.
Misattributed
Claimed to be written by James while intoxicated by nitrous oxide. Does not appear in his essay Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide. First attributed, not necessarily seriously, by Robert Anton Wilson in his Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy (1979). Possibly Wilson's version is his humorous descendant of a statement in an 1870 address by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., about his own experience with chloroform: "A strong smell of turpentine pervades the whole." In 1945 Bertrand Russell claimed that James reported a similar statement from an unnamed man.
Source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/31/turpentine-prevails/ Quote Investigator

“The flower of sweetest smell is shy and lowly.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Not Love, Not War, Nor the Tumultuous Swell, l. 14

Flowers

“She, of a particular and unique beauty. The features of his face and her body are of a subtle transgression that blends between sweetness and sensuality. Her charm smells of woman.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Lei, di una particolare ed unica bellezza. I lineamenti del suo volto e del suo corpo sono di una sottile trasgressione che si fonde tra dolcezza e sensualità. Il suo fascino profuma di donna.
Source: prevale.net

Beauty

“Brexxxitlover smells his own farts”

jonny632895260895368753263526532

“The days fly by. I can smell the weekend already. The repetition of days is so boring to observe.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Flying

“What liars don't realize is that they are the most obvious people. bullshit isn't that hard to smell. Just open ya nose and breathe. Aaahh!”

Jussie Smollett (1982) American actor, singer, director and photographer

Source: 27 November 2010 https://twitter.com/jussiesmollett/status/8602162678468608

People

“We are enraptured lover and insane, we searched the Beloved everywhere. When I smell the fragrance of His divinity, I get intoxicated in His lane.”

Bu Ali Shah Qalandar (1209–1324) Indian Sufi saint

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 271

Search, Lovers

“I, for instance, don't see any smells whatsoever.”

Vitali Klitschko (1971) Ukrainian boxer and politician

While tasting tap water
2015
Source: * Я не вижу запаха и ни слышу привкуса.Мэр Киева Кличко. ** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_tjA3US0ps ** en ** 2022-06-13

“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

“The complicated, crazy and audacious woman… the woman who sculpts the thought, who knows how to excite and fascinate… the woman who smells of life and love: she kidnaps mind, soul and heart.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: La donna complicata, pazza e audace... la donna che scolpisce il pensiero, che sa emozionare e affascinare... la donna che profuma di vita e amore: rapisce mente, anima e cuore.
Source: prevale.net

Love, Life, Soul, Heart

“It's not common to find the woman who smells of dignity, the strong woman who knows how to speak the truth, delicate and complicated because she knows her value and who could belong only to who dare to love her every defect, with notable respect.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Non è comune trovare la donna che profuma di dignità, la donna forte che sa dire la verità, delicata e complicata perché consapevole del suo valore e che potrebbe appartenere solo a chi osa amare ogni suo difetto, con notevole rispetto.
Source: prevale.net

Love, Truth, Strong

“Love those who smell of freedom.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Amate chi profuma di libertà.
Source: prevale.net

Love, Freedom

Quotes about smell page 7

Quotes about smell
page 7