Pungent Smell Quotes & Sayings

Quantin crept closer to the knoll. A pungent smell passed through his nostrils up into his brain. Attracted by the poppies' scarlet smears, he was about to take another step when he felt a hand on his elbow. A man in a poppy-red jacket, his pupils dilated, smiled warningly.
"No strangers allowed. Go away."
"I don't understand ... "
"Understanding is strictly forbidden. Even dreams have the right to dream. Isn't that so? Now go away. — Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Dorcas wasn't a fast walker. It was difficult for me to keep behind her. I tried to let others, joggers, and bicyclists, come between us. I followed her past a field where girls were playing soccer, and into the woods bordering Catamount Creek. The smell of pine needles underfoot was sharp, pungent. I seemed to know that I would always associate that smell with this afternoon, and with Dorcas. — Joyce Carol Oates

The plowing's done. The seed is spread. The weather is reminding me that, rain or shine, the earth abides, the land endures, the soil will persevere forever and a day. Its smell is pungent and high-seasoned. This is happiness. — Jim Crace

I had been invited to speak after the lunch. But I did not go to the table until the feast ended, as I never like to eat or talk before speaking. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay. — Octave Mirbeau

As the excesses of 'molecular gastronomy' have slowly faded away, like the smell of a particularly pungent fart, a breath of fresh culinary air has swept across the country. I've been passionately interested in food and drink for more than 30 years and writing about it for a decade. In my experience there has never been a more exciting time to eat out in this country. — Andy Lynes

Hello there," he said to me. "My name is Buddy Ray. What's yours?" He had a faint lisp. I swallowed. "Robert Johnson." Buddy Ray's smile would make small children flee to their mamas. "Nice to meet you, Robert." Buddy Ray - I didn't know if that was a double first name or a first and last name - looked me over as though I were a bite-size snack. Something was off with this guy - you could just see it. He kept licking his lips. I risked a glance back at the big bouncer. Even he looked jittery in Buddy Ray's presence. As Buddy Ray approached, a pungent stench of cheap cologne failing to mask foul body odor wafted off him, the foul smell taking the lead like a Doberman he was walking. Buddy Ray stopped directly in front of me, maybe six inches away. I held my breath and stood my ground. I, too, had a foot on him. The bouncer took another step backward. Buddy — Harlan Coben

It took me years after stopping the cocaine before I was able to enjoy a sunrise and enjoy the sound of birds. — Valerie Bertinelli

O'Shaughnessy is hitting Denholt on the side of his head with his free arm, great, walloping, pile-driver blows. The two of them stagger together, like partners in a crazy dance. Glass is breaking all around them. Gray smoke from the six shots, pink-and-white dust from the chipped brick-and-plaster walls, swirl around them in a rainbow haze. Something vividly green flares up from one of the overturned retorts, goes right out again. O'Shaughnessy tears the emptied gun away, flings it off somewhere. More breaking glass, and this time a tart pungent smell that makes the nostrils sting. The crunch of pulverized tube glass underfoot makes it sound as if they were scuffling in sand or hard-packed snow. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

When cool-climate relatives and friends are astonished to hear such temperatures, Pico Mundians put a chamber-of-commerce spin on our meteorology, noting that the humidity is a mere fifteen or twenty percent. Our average summer day, they insist, isn't like a sweltering steam bath but like a refreshing sauna. — Dean Koontz

The casket was gunmetal gray with a blanket of white lilies covering the closed lid. The smell of wet earth was pungent as the machine lowered his body into the grave. Claire's knees went weak. Her grandmother stroked her back. Her mother offered her arm. Claire shook her head. She thought of strong things: iron. Steel. Paul. It was not until they were climbing into the back of the black limousine that Claire truly understood that she would never see her husband again. — Karin Slaughter

If you want to be more alive, love is the truest health. — Rumi

Milton puts it most profoundly when he says, Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. In other words, the power of truth lies not in abstract propositions but in the understanding and willful application of truth by living, breathing persons which can occur only in the context of liberty. — Karen Swallow Prior

All my nose is picking up on is the smell of green alfalfa hay and baling twine. I check with Keeper to see if he's sniffing up either hide or hair of Sneaky Tim Ray since my dog can can whiff dubious intentions from an acre away. People can hide their badness from one another, but the scent of wrongdoing is pungent and unmistakable to our four-legged friends. — Lesley Kagen

So I departed, leaving behind a pungent smell of brimstone. Just something to remember me by. — Jonathan Stroud

Come to the stable. Come to where the horses are, and the sweet, grainy, pungent smells. — Monica Dickens

A pungent smell of manure blew in the window. "The odor of these Scottish wildflowers is astonishing," Edie said, — Eloisa James

Your childhood, said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties.
Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind. — Gregory Maguire

With this house. Placing his hand on the cool metal handle on the door of his black Bentley, he barely heard the familiar click as the catch released. And as he climbed into the seat, he was oblivious to the fresh, pungent smell of the smooth leather upholstery. Pulling quickly out of the driveway, Rafe began heading the short distance to the city, where he had a condo a couple of blocks from his office building. Luckily, Sharron had refused to live in San Francisco, causing him to sleep there on the many late nights he'd worked. The apartment was his - his — Melody Anne

I love you as only a lover can. Less depressed, less obsessed, I am better than ever able to love your hair, which has blond lights in it, and your remarkable eyes, the blue of my Nana's chipped china. I love the smell of your skin, impossible to describe except to say it's a confluence of many pungent things, and I love your chest with the disks of your nipples, and your thighs striated with sweat, and your back and your breath while you are above me. — Lauren Slater

Boys don't smell the same as girls. They have a pungent, leathery, underneath smell, like old rope, like damp dogs. — Margaret Atwood

Sulfuric ether was sweet and hot, pungent and burning to the palate. It did not smell the least, to Nardi, of turpentine, but rather of large, white, oversweet flowers, fat, fleshy, prehistoric in their size and substance. He thought of these flowers as fringed, mouthed, and pistiled with sticky aroma, with pink-tipped, translucent styles and stigmas that moved in flower throats like beckoning fingers. Lush, languorously heavy, meltingly ephemeral, an indulgence to the New World tropics or an Old World greenhouse - something akin to night-blooming cereus. Ether, to him, was the nectar of such flowers, gathered and carried in the mouths of foot-long bumblebees, its aroma as old as Egypt, as modern as white walled hospitals, as personal and familiar as his own vague euphoric befuddlement. — Judy Cuevas

Australia! Australians! Surely it's still full of Magwitch-types, lumbering oafs with shaven pates and broken noses on the run from whatever law there is, chucking kangaroo heads on the barbie as they read their awful bush poetry. — Dave Franklin

Blackberry is a great product and really useful. But I think that Yahoo!'s future is going to be rooted in mobile apps. And we know that we need to have apps on some of the core platforms, and so iOS and Android, probably the two most important platforms for us. — Marissa Mayer