Sense Of Smell Quotes

“Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.”
― Roman Payne

“I’d loved women who were old and who were young; those extra kilos and large rumps, and others so thin there was barely even skin to pinch, and every time I held them, I worried I would snap them in two. But for all of these: where they had merited my love was in their delicious smell. Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.”
― Roman Payne

“The cent you desire is hidden in the scent of a flower.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“Once again I felt light-headed, but this time it wasn't from the scent of lilacs; it was from the scent of my own death.”
― Peter David, Sir Apropos of Nothing

“Amanda took the lead following her sense of smell. On the other hand, I followed a werewolf who was leading me by her nose. Not sure, which of us was crazier.”
― Jazz Feylynn, Colorado State of Mind

“Every now and then the breeze carries a distinct hint of eau de sheep."
"Really?" Annabelle sniffed experimentally. "I don't smell a thing."
"That's because you don't have a nose," Lillian replied.
"I beg your pardon?" Annabelle asked with a quizzical grin.
"Oh, you have a regular sort of nose," Lillian explained, "but I have 'a nose.' I'm unusually sensitive to smell. Give me any perfume, and I can separate it into all its parts. Rather like listening to a musical chord and dividing all its notes. Before we left New York, I even helped to develop a formula for scented soap, for my father's factory."
"Could you create a perfume, do you think?" Annabelle asked in fascination.
"I daresay I could create an excellent perfume," Lillian said confidently.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Secrets of a Summer Night

“Look, I fetched some Fat Hen for you.' Jem offered me a bunch of wilting greens.
I reached for the plants, rubbed the leaves with a snap of my finger and thumb and sniffed. They were as fresh as spinach but not so peppery and warm. And wasn't that a faint whiff of cat's piss? Mrs G always said I could sniff a drop of honey in a pail of milk. I used my nose then and saved us all from a night of gripes.
'That's not Fat Hen, you noddle. That's Dog's Mercury. Once I knew a band of tinkers that made a soup of it and near died. If I serve that up to the new mistress I could be hanged for murder.'
'God help us. Give it back here. It's ill-omened.' He hurled the plants towards the hog's trough.”
― Martine Bailey, An Appetite for Violets

“Grace handed the rose back to the old vendor; then she turned and started to walk away.
After a few steps, unable to resist the fragrance still in her mind, she stopped and came back. "Hungarian, right?" she asked the vendor as she pointed to the bucket of pinkish roses, spying Patrick's curiosity.
"They're roses, lady," he said.
Grace bent over and stuck her face right into the heads of the entire bucketful of sweet-scented pinkish flowers. "Rosa gallica officinalis, definitely," she said mostly to herself. "I'm betting from east of the Danube, probably in the plains around Scabolcs-Szatmar-Bereg," Grace pronounced with a pretty good East European accent. She smelled them again, pulled herself away, and again mumbled to herself aloud. "Great depth. Would make a killer base note in a spicy summer parfum." She looked again at Patrick and pointed to the pinkish flowers in the bucket, and quickly walking away, she stated with a professional tone: "Those are nice."
Undoubtedly, Patrick noted, this was a woman much more interested in roses than in the men who presented them.”
― Jeffrey Stepakoff, The Orchard

“Can you name me these ingredients?" Chef Amadí points to the different herbs and spices. "I can see that you know," she says. And I do know.
I pick up the large leaf and sniff it. It's smaller than the type we use back home but I'd know that scent anywhere. "That one's bay leaf," I say. "And that seed is cardamom."
She nods and shoots me a wink.
She moves us to a different station and opens a container where several large octopi chill on beds of ice. I've never worked with octopus and I'm fascinated by the vibrant red color of the skin and the slippery feeling of it in my hands. She demonstrates with a knife how to slice through the octopus tentacles that she will marinate for grilling.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, With the Fire on High

“Notwithstanding the pressure in the room, this was always an emotional moment for Grace Lyndon, when someone was experiencing a scent she had created. When Grace was a little girl, her mother became very sick and lost her ability to hold down food, and in her final days lost her sight. But her sense of smell remained, strong as ever, and young Grace would bring to her mother's bedside fresh cut flowers, lilac and iris and tea rose, the sweet scents infusing the room with light and earth and memories long forgotten, and Grace brought in special foods to smell, like warm orange-ginger rolls, glazed and fragrant as winter holiday mornings, and cotton linens, laundered in lavender water and line-dried so you could smell the sun in them, and slices of ripe apples, a scent so perfect that in the end, it made her mother cry bittersweetly.”
― Jeffrey Stepakoff, The Orchard

“There was something about the scent of apple, she thought, that was truly unique to just that fruit-- it really did touch on so many childhood memories. Probably because it was among the first baby foods so many ate.
"This is going to be so very popular," she said thoughtfully. "I might tone down some of the earth notes, maybe bring up some of the brightness."
Dylan observed as she made some exacting adjustments to the dials while simultaneously watching their correlating meters.
Grace took a few quick sniffs, smiled, and then held the nose cup to his face again. He put his hand on hers and drew the cup even closer.
"I think this balance would make a lovely cider or a blend to an organic cinnamon and apple oatmeal," she said.
"Yes," said Dylan, nodding. "Hot from the pan on a cold autumn morning. I can absolutely smell that."
"Let's bring up a spice note, warm up the composition a bit." Watching his face, her left hand still with his, her right hand reaching out to the dials, Grace adjusted the machine, and she could see from his face when she was hitting just the right notes.
Dylan started laughing.
"What?" she asked happily.
"I smell my mother's apple pie." He pressed his warm hand to hers on the cup as he inhaled. "That's amazing!" Then he grabbed her hand and moved the cup toward her. "Here, you have to try this."
Their hands still together, she inhaled. "Oh, this 'is' amazing. Yum." Grace reached for a dial and adjusted it. "I think I can bring up a butter note in here." A blissful expression came over her face as she sniffed the computer's new modulation. "Try this," she said, moving the cup toward Dylan.
Eagerly, he leaned in to her, his head nearly against hers, their hair touching as she held the nose cup out for him. He took in a whiff. "How about just a little more butter?"
She adjusted a dial and leaned even closer, so that they were both taking in the scent from the one nose cup.
Grace turned to him and they locked eyes, their faces together, their hands together on the nose cup before them, which eased forth the intoxicating aroma of hot apple pie.”
― Jeffrey Stepakoff, The Orchard

“He could smell the readiness of onion in every one of its stages of cooking and knew exactly what stage worked best for each dish. He could identify the exact rapidity with which milk had to boil before adding the lemon to make the cheese curd separate into paneer. He could sense exactly when to add the tomatoes to tie together the onion, garlic, and ginger so that the curry came together perfectly with the oil separating from it in syrupy rivulets.”
― Sonali Dev, Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

“Well, it's definitely banana. What banana dishes do you have?"
"Do the bananas smell ripe?" Hadley interjected, grabbing Max's attention.
Her turned in his chair. "Yes, but not overly so."
"So not mashed up and cooked in?"
He thought for a moment. "No, I don't think so."
She nodded. "Pecans or walnuts?"
Max closed his eyes and brought the earthy smell of the dish to the forefront of his mind. "Pecans. And... coconut, maybe?"
"Oh!" Holly exclaimed with excitement. "That's the Caribbean pancakes!”
― Bethany Turner, Hadley Beckett's Next Dish

“It smells like strippers in here.”
― Mark A. Henry, Lacking Evidence to the Contrary: A Lowbrow Novel of Questionable Necessity

“What is it?" I asked.
"Rain," she said.
"It's too early for rain."
"That's what you think. Open the door. You'll see."
I turned off the air conditioner so that we could hear better, slid open the glass door -- and the soft thunder of rain falling onto sand curtained us in. Deaf, we would still have known it was raining: smell would have told us; the smell of dry earth watered, of dehydrated vegetation reconstituted, the smell of resurrection. The first rain in a dry land! It smells better than lilies in July, or the ocean, or the wind in sun-warmed pines, or the irrigated patch of alfalfa you reach after a long haul through dry hills. It is hard to smell that sweetness and believe in death.”
― Jessamyn West, A Matter of Time

“The wine was cold and refreshing on her tongue, sliding down her throat like a mouthful of winter air. She closed her eyes and sniffed the bouquet. Ripe apricots smashing open on gray rocks, the smell of cut grass. She still could not taste anything but bitter in the wine, but she could feel it, feel where it had come from. She turned the bottle around and read the description, smiling at the words "ripe stone fruit" and "mineral complexity.”
― Rachel Linden, Recipe for a Charmed Life

“Rosemary. I breathed in. Its fragrance was woodsy and herbal, rich and savory and layered with olive oil and pine. By that age, I'd been aware for years that my sense of scent was highly attuned; everywhere I went, fragrances whispered to me, telling me of the world, revealing to me insights that were hidden from others. But it wasn't until I held that rosemary in my hands that I began to understand my powerful connection to plants and their scents.”
― Meg Donohue, The Memory Gardener

“And then one day, as I stood in front of the plant, puzzling over its unusual size and the strange connection that I felt to it, I sensed the rosemary's earthy, green, complex fragrance intensifying, lifting above all of the herbs' scents, pressing so close to me that it felt like breath against my skin, a murmured answer to my questions. The aroma was so strong that I could almost see it, gossamer and shimmering in the air.”
― Meg Donohue, The Memory Gardener