I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odor of outdoors on it I want to cry.
—Margaret Atwood
Fear has a smell, as love does.
—Margaret Atwood
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
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
Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.
—P. J. O'Rourke
The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.
—Rudyard Kipling
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
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
There smites nothing so sharp, nor smelleth so sour as shame.
—William Langland