the odor QUOTES

1 " Niall had been able to mask the odor of fairy from Eric in the restaurant, but I saw from the flare of Eric's nostrils that the intoxicating scent clung to me. Eric's eyes closed in ecstasy, and he actually licked his lips. I felt like a T-bone just out of reach of a hungry dog. " Snap out of it," I said. I wasn't in the mood.With a huge effort, Eric reigned himself in. " When you smell like that," he said, " I just wanna fuck you and bite you and rub myself all over you. "

2 " In the midst of the heavy, hot fragrance of summer, and of the clean salty smell of the sea, there was the odor of wounded men, a sickly odor of blood and antiseptics which marked the zone of every military hospital. All Athens quickly took on that odor, as the wounded Greek soldiers were moved out of hospitals and piled into empty warehouses to make way for German wounded. Now every church, every empty lot, every school building in Athens is full of wounded, and on the pathways of Zappion, the park in the heart of Athens, bandaged men in makeshift wheel chairs are to be seen wherever one walks. Zappion is a profusion of flowers, heavy-scented luxurious flowers; but even the flower fragrance is not as strong as that of blood. "

― ,

3 " The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn. "

― Edward Abbey , Desert Solitaire

4 " By the sandy water I breathe in the odor of the sea,
From there the wind comes and blows over the world,
By the sandy water I breathe in the odor of the sea,
From there the clouds come and rain falls over the world. "

― , In the Trail of the Wind: American Indian Poems and Ritual Orations

5 " Well, there is a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it is German, to forget what you can't bear. The strong can forget, can shut out history.
Very good. Even if it is self-flattery to speak of strength--these aesthetic philosophers, they take a posture, but power sweeps postures away. Still, it's true you can't go on transposing one nightmare into another, Nietzsche was certainly right about that. The tender-minded must harden themselves. Is this world nothing but a barren lump of coke? No, no, but what sometimes seems a system of prevention, a denial of what every human being knows.
I love my children, but I am the world to them, and bring them nightmares.
I had this child by my enemy. And I love her. The sight of her, the odor of her hair, this minute, makes me tremble with love. Isn't it mysterious how I love the child of my enemy?
But a man doesn't need happiness for himself.
No, he can put up with any amount of torment--with recollections, with his own familiar evils, despair.
And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning. "

― Saul Bellow , Herzog

6 " The woman is not just a pleasure, nor even a problem. She is a meniscus that allows the absolute to have a shape, that lets him skate however briefly on the mystery, her presence luminous on the ordinary and the grand. Like the odor at night in Pittsburgh’s empty streets after summer rain on maples and sycamore. "

― Jack Gilbert , Collected Poems

7 " Masculine exhalations are, as a rule, stronger, more vivid,more widely differentiated than those of women. In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all the things strong and beautiful and joyous and gives me a sense of physical happiness. "

― Helen Keller

8 " Not to be too dramatic about it, that night I slept the sleep of the damned. I dreamt of turrets and craggy ledges where the windswept rain blew in from the ocean with the odor of violets. A pale woman in Elizabethan dress stood beside my bed and whispered in my ear that the bells would ring. An old salt in an oilcloth jacket sat atop a piling, mending nets with an awl, while far out at sea a tine aeroplane winged its way towards the setting sun. "

― Alan Bradley

9 " I dreamt of turrets and craggy ledges where the windswept rain blew in from the ocean with the odor of violets. A pale woman in Elizabethan dress stood beside my bed and whispered in my ear that the bells would ring. An old salt in an oilcloth jacket sat atop a piling, mending nets with an awl, while far out at sea a tiny aeroplane winged its way towards the setting sun. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

10 " If you want big improvements, she said, chew gum. Gum? Sure enough, chewing gum has been shown to improve a person's immediate recall of learned words by some 24 percent. Long-term recall improves by a larger 36 percent. To get the benefit, you actually have to chew gum as you are studying; for some reason you can't merely move your jaw up and down. I also discovered that drinking sage tea increases one's recall of words modestly, as does the odor of rosemary. Something as mundane as coffee provides a benefit, too. Drinking two cups of coffee increases neuronal activity in the frontal lobe, where working memory is controlled, and in the anterior cingulum, where attention is controlled. "

― Michael Erard , Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners

11 " She once told him about the mysterious trampled-down places found in fields, which the peasants superstitiously called werewolves' nests. Coming across one of these sites, she fell to her knees and buried her face in the flattened yellow grasses, hoping to inhale the odor of a werewolf, a csordásfarkas. As if his scent was a charm. She smelled nothing but hay burned by the afternoon sun. "

― , The Fig Eater

12 " Could you just imagine? If every suicide rose--think of Faulkner's Quentin Compson as a vampire. I don't hate the South I don't I don't. She wondered how they'd have worked it out in Cambridge when Quentin threw himself off the Andersen bridge into the Charles amid the odor of the honeysuckle, not the beer, sweat, rum, and tainted magnolias of this city, precariously beneath the level of the water. The Compson blood had thinned out; at least this way, he's restore it after a fashion. "

― ,

13 " The worst thing about the dead rising? (Other than, you know, all the zombies?) The smell. Nothing kills the mood like the odor of three day old road kill and poo... -Katherine Anita Cho(KyCH) "

― S.P. Durnin

14 " Inside, the box was divided into tiered chambers, each with a lacquered lid, and these held a selection of ground and whole spices: sage, turmeric, cumin, ginger, mustard, cinnamon, asafetida, mace, cayenne, and cloves. I felt like an emperor receiving the treasures of a new country. The odor rising from the box was like a clambering vine wrapping itself thickly around my head, musky with the deep minerals of the earth and dusting my shoulders with a rainbow of pollen. "

― Eli Brown , Cinnamon and Gunpowder

15 " People not only stinks because of the odor but also because of the character. "

16 " He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy. "

― Henry James , The American

17 " BurialCathy Linh CheThere is the rain, the odor of fresh earth, and you, grandmother, in a box. I bury the distance, 22 years of not meeting you and your ruined hands.I bury your hair, parted to the side and pinned back, your áo dài of crushed velvet, the implements you used to farm,the stroke which claimed your right side, the land you gave up when you remarried, your grief over my grandfather's passing,the war that evaporated your father's leg, the war that crushed your bowls, your childhood home razedby the rutted wheels of an American tank— I bury it all.You learned that nothing stays in this life, not your daughter, not your uncle, not even the dignity of leaving this worldwith your pants on. The bed sores on your hips were clean and sunken in. What did I know, child who heard you speak only once,and when we met for the first time, tears watered the side of your face. I held your hand and said,bà ngoai, bà ngoaiTen years later, I returned. It rained on your gravesite. In the picture above your tomb,you looked just like my mother. We lit the joss sticks and planted them. We kept the encroaching grass at bay. "

18 " An Evening Air
I go out in the grey evening
In the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation.

I go out into the hard loneliness of the barren field of grey evening
In the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation.

In the gathering darkness a long, swift train suddenly
Passes me like a lighting.
Hard and ponderous and loud are the wheels.
As ponderous as the darkness, and as beautiful.

I look on, enchanted, and listen to the sounds of lamentation
In the soft fragrant air.
The long rails, grey-dark, smooth as a serpent, shiver, and

A soft, low thing cries out in the distance,
But the sounds are hard and heavy,
In the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation. "

― Samar Sen

19 " In the State of Denmark there was the odor of decay... "

― Roger Zelazny , Nine Princes in Amber (The Chronicles of Amber #1)

20 " The whiff of ocean on the southern breeze and the smell of burning asphalt brought back memories of summers past. It had seemed as though those sweet dreams of summer would last forever: the warmth of a girl’s skin, an old rock ‘n’ roll song, freshly washed button-down shirt, the odor of cigarette smoke in a pool changing room, a fleeting premonition. Then one summer (when had it been?) the dreams had vanished, never to return. "

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