We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

—Tom Stoppard

memory progress smell burning bridges

About Tom Stoppard

Portrait of Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard (; born Tomáš Sträussler; 3 July 1937 – 29 November 2025) was a British playwright and screenwriter. He wrote for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covered the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical...

More quotations from Tom Stoppard

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

—Tom Stoppard

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

—Tom Stoppard

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

—Tom Stoppard

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

—Tom Stoppard

A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.

—Tom Stoppard

More quotations tagged with “smell”

Christ didn't say, "Love humanity as thyself," but, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and do you know why? Because your neighbor, by definition, is the person nearby, the man sitting next to you in the underground who smells, perhaps, the man next to you in the queue who maybe tries to barge ahead of you; in short, your neighbor is the person who threatens your own liberty.

—Luciano De Crescenzo

humanity love freedom liberty Christianity smell neighbor

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

—Rudyard Kipling

understanding learning memory countries smell foreignness

Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.

—P. J. O'Rourke

smell food fish

Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It’s amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn’t even pay attention to at the time, a place that you didn’t even know had a particular smell.

—Emily Giffin in Something Borrowed

time memory music smell songs

The sense of smell in the animal is what intuition is to the human spirit. It tells you of the invisible, of what cannot be detected by any other means. It tells you the things that are not there, yet are coming. You see into the blind, opaque past and round the corner of time.

—Laurens Van der Post

invisible spirit smell animals blindness

History

21 Jul 2019 Added