Reek Quotes & Sayings

There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book. — Arthur Conan Doyle

You're pale and you're cold, and you reek like steel. — Brenna Yovanoff

I'm not him, I'm not the turncloak, he died at Winterfell. My name is Reek, It rhymes with freak — George R R Martin

(And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mention how the reek of the fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you'll see modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATO headquarters, and a sign that says Izmir ... ) — Jeffrey Eugenides

There's something unrefined about a reading woman, they always reek of the lamp. How can she grow up to be a lady if she's always got her nose
in a book?
Granny Rudin — Florence King

We all reek of weariness. A room full of the black-soul phenomenon. All of a sudden I don't feel so alone in the recognition of my own mixed feelings mirrored in those faces. In those faces, I see that the seemingly repugnant behavior wasn't so atrocious after all. Everything is forgiv- able. Everything we said and did and felt was magnified by the pres- ence of something we couldn't control, and that fact definitely brought out the crazy. Each of us will carry a balance of regret and pride for the rest of our lives. — Angela Ricketts

So as I'm walking up and down the grocery aisles, I notice this distinct, mildewy, putrid odor following me. And I keep looking around for the responsible party, until I discover that she is me. I stink. When I get home, Craig rolls out of bed to help me with the groceries and I say "Honey, smell me. I stink." And he sniffs my shirt and says without surprise, "Yes, you do." And I say "Well, what IS that? It's disgusting." And he says the following:
"It's mildew. All our clothes smell like that. We always stink." I'll just give you a few seconds to digest that information. I know I needed a little time. "WHAT? WELL WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME, HUSBAND?" "I was scared to tell you. You get sensitive about ... . housekeeping stuff." "Oh. So let me clarify here. You'd rather reek all day at work and allow Chase to be THE STINKY KID IN CLASS than risk me getting mad?
"Yes. Yes, I would. Definitely. — Glennon Doyle Melton

He stole glances at the heathen faces of Bodien and Gaylord, the suffering, yet oddly consoled, eyes and mouth of Basellecci, noting the brave enthusiasm of men who had never dreamed of anything very definite, and it occurred to him through the reek of his person that there was only one hope for him, and for all people who had lost, through intelligence, the hope of immortality. "We must love and delight in each other and in ourselves!" he cried. — Edward Lewis Wallant

Soldiers planted like vegetables waiting for the day of harvest. ... everything is more intense at night, perfectly beautiful, and when the wind shifts and the reek of rotting meat vanishes for a few blessed minutes you can smell the sweet scent of the countryside. — Louis De Bernieres

It was a singular bedroom, with its high walls of brown volumes, but there could be no more agreeable furniture to a bookworm like myself, and there is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book. I assured him that I could desire no more charming chamber, and no more congenial surroundings. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Oh! mothers aren't fair - I mean it's not fair of nature to weigh us down with them and yet expect us to be our own true selves. The handicap's too great. All those months, when the same blood's running through two sets of veins - there's no getting away from that, ever after. Take yours. As I say, does she need to open her mouth? Not she! She's only got to let it hang at the corners, and you reek, you drip with guilt. — Henry Handel Richardson

It can't be good news," Leif said. "I'd doubt you would brave the weather just to say hello."
"You opened the door before I could knock," I said. "You must know something's up."
Leif wiped the rain from his face. "I smelled you coming."
"Smelled?"
"You reek of Lavender. Do you bathe in Mother's perfume or just wash your cloak with it?" he teased.
"How mundane. I was thinking of something a little more magical. — Maria V. Snyder

Ignore the reek of feces in the air, the bloodstains on the ground, and you have yourself a glorious night. — Katherine McIntyre

I forget your name," I said.
"Most people spew shit from their arse," he retorted, "you manage it with your mouth."
"Your mother gave birth through her arse," I said, "and you still reek of her shit. — Bernard Cornwell

A modern woman sees a piece of linen, but the mediaeval woman saw through it to the flax fields, she smelt the reek of the retting ponds, she felt the hard rasp of the hackling, and she saw the soft sheen of the glossy flax. Man did not see 'just leather', he saw the beast - perhaps one of his own - and knew the effort of slaughtering, liming and curing.
Communities were smaller and whether our man lived on the outskirts of some feudal system, had escaped from it, or was entirely isolated, he would work alone, or daily with the same fellow-workers - conversation would soon languish.
But THINK he must. — Dorothy Hartley

And the funny, impish magic of a wrap party is that everyone still has scraps of their characters hanging off them like Salome's veils, fluttering, fading, but not quite finished tangling the tongue and tripping the feet. You're not in Wonderland anymore, but you positively reek of rabbit. — Catherynne M Valente

The rat squealed as he bit into it, squirming wildly in his hands, frantic to escape. — George R R Martin

A wilderness of gilt, gleaming in the slant from the dust-furred windows: gilded cupids, gilded commodes and torchieres, and
undercutting the old-wood smell
the reek of turpentine, oil paint, and varnish. — Donna Tartt

Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped. — James Joyce

Interesting, isn't it, that even though more than two and a half decades have passed since the sexual revolution brought women a new measure of sexual freedom, there's still no word in the language that doesn't reek with pejorative connotation to describe a woman who has sex freely. Since language frames thought and sets its limits, this is not a trivial matter. For without a word that describes without condemning, it's hard to think about it neutrally as well. When we say the words 'promiscuous woman,' therefore, it's a statement about her character, not just her sexual behavior. — Lillian B. Rubin

I'm getting older, so how people face grave circumstances is of interest to me. And you meet a lot of people who are very courageous, and it doesn't reek of something funny to write about, but I always think that the higher the stakes, the bigger the laughs can be, and the more emotional the scenes can be. — Judd Apatow

Worry implies that we don't quite trust God is big enough, powerful enough, or loving enough to take care of what's happening in our lives.
Stress says the things we are involved in are important enough to merit our impatience, our lack of grace towards others, or our tight grip of control.
Basically, these two behaviors communicate that it's okay to sin and not trust God because the stuff in my life is somehow exceptional. Both worry and stress reek of arrogance. They declare our tendency to forget that we've been forgiven, that our lives are brief ... and that in the context of God's strength, our problems are small, indeed. — Francis Chan

The devil, he's about this big. He had a red suit on and a widow's peak, and then a pointed tail, and like a sulfur reek. Yes, it was him alright, I swear. — Frank Zappa

Are you still doing that crap?" I ask.
"You can't even do it properly," Eileen says.
"Just a matter of practice," Simone says.
"Wow! Practicing how to poison yourself and make your breath reek like the fart of a seagull!" Eileen cries. — Randa Abdel-Fattah

As soon as the cold became uncomfortable, Eli had opened his shirt and had a nice long chat with the burn on his chest. Karon was happy to help them stick it to the ice and wind spirits, and he cheerfully kept the air around Eli as warm and dry as a smokehouse.
"I only wish it didn't reek of sulfur," Josef said, pressing up the mountainside. "I'd almost rather deal with the cold."
"Well, don't let me stop you," Eli huffed, though even he looked a little green. "Who am I to stand between a man and his frostbite? — Rachel Aaron

Whether with a lover or none. i reek of love. i stink of love. — Nayyirah Waheed

If she pops out sons the way she pops in tarts, the Dreadfort will soon be overrun with Boltons. — George R R Martin

There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in Western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling red in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead of me.

It's the beautiful thing about youth.

There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential. — Blake Crouch

He waved away the whiskeybottle with a smile. In this tall room, the cracked plaster sootstreaked with the shapes of laths beneath, this barrenness, this fellowship of the doomed. Where life pulsed obscenely fecund. In the drift of voices and the laughter and the reek of stale beer the Sunday loneliness seeped away.
Aint that right Suttree?
What's that?
About there bein caves all in under the city.
That's right.
What all's down there in em?
Blind slime. As above, so it is below. Suttree shrugged.
Nothing that I know of, he said. They're just some caves. — Cormac McCarthy

Classifiable things reek of death. You must strike out in other spheres ... quit the ranks. That's the sign of masterpieces and heroes. An original, that's the person to astonish and to rule. — Jean Cocteau

For the first time his senses began to register the exotic, heady atmosphere of Mumbai ... the odors most insistently demanded his attention. There were layers upon layers of them, all present at once but individually distinct. They shifted in strength and character with the ocean breeze that blew soft, irregular gusts across his face. First came the sharp tang of engine fuel mingled with an even more acrid burning smell, as though something unnatural had been set alight to blanket the city with a smoldering stench. A shift in the air's direction brought a fresher aroma of salt and brine floating in from the sea. It gave way to the hot smell of spices frying in oil, which in turn incongruously merged with the subtle reek of garbage. — Kathryn Guare

Manon Blackbeak awoke to the sighing of leaves, the distant call of wary birds, and the reek of loam and ancient wood. She — Sarah J. Maas

Ajax defending his honor when he fought against Troy along with Ulysses, who claimed his actions enabled the Greeks to be victorious. The chiefs side with Ulysses, and Ajax, having lost his honor as a warrior, draws his sword and proclaims:
But this at least is mine, or does Ulysses claim this also for himself? This I must employ against myself; and the sword which has often reeked with Phrygian blood will now reek with its masters, lest any man but Ajax ever conquer Ajax. — Ovid

I would rather people not smoke. I certainly appreciate the fact that smoking is not legal in restaurants and bars. That used to stop me from going out at night because you'd go someplace and your clothes would reek and you wouldn't enjoy the experience and that affects your rights. It's always a question. — Ian Bremmer

Look at yourself, idiot. You reek like the slaughter-house. Plan your dastard's revenge as you like. But for those of us liking our company civilized, spare us the horror and bathe yourself first! — Janny Wurts

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,
With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;
And men are whithered before their prime
By the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.
And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed,
In the smothering reek of mill and mine;
And death stalks in on the struggling crowd
But he shuns the shadow of the oak and pine — George W. Sears Nessmuk

Why does your weak king send a filthy pirate to do his bidding?" sneered the Fjerdan ambassador, his words echoing across the cathedral.
"Privateer," corrected Sturmhond. "I suppose he thought my good looks would give me the advantage. Not a concern where you're from, I take it?"
"Preening, ridiculous peacock. You stink of Grisha foulness."
Sturmhond sniffed the air. "I'm amazed you can detect anything over the reek of ice and inbreeding."
The ambassador turned purple, and one of his companions hastily drew him away. — Leigh Bardugo

As his people positioned themselves in and around the pass, Arin though that he might have misunderstood the Valorian addiction to war. He had assumed it was spurred by greed. By a savage sense of superiority. It had never occurred to him that Valorians also went to war because of love.
Arin loved those hours of waiting. The silent, brilliant tension, like scribbles of heat lightning. His city far below and behind him, his hand on a cannon's curve, ears open to the acoustics of the pass. He stared into it, and even though he smelled the reek of fear from men and women around him, he was caught in a kind of wonder.He felt so vibrant. As if his life was fresh, translucent, thin-skinned fruit. It could be sliced apart and he wouldn't care. Nothing felt like this. — Marie Rutkoski

The combined odors of Cass's subtle aftershave and the disgusting reek of Nic are overpowering. I wonder if Cass will keel over and I'll have to perform CPR. This speculation should not feel so much like a fantasy. — Huntley Fitzpatrick

Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome. — Christopher Hitchens

I step out of Bourbon Bandits onto the sidewalk of Geary Street and take my place among the zombies and psychopaths. How do I tell the difference? The psychopaths wear suits. The zombies have skin peeling off their faces and reek of rotting teeth and were likely the extras in a movie we were all in but forgot about. — Logan Ryan Smith

It wasn't right. Evil should look evil. It should reek like rotten flesh, not smell like pine cleaner and fabric softener — Sydney Croft

No mystery surrounded his nickname: he was enormous and he was filthy. Pig smelled so bad it confused people. When they encountered his reek, they looked around him for the source, so implausible did it seem that the odor could emanate from a human. — Michael Punke

Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle. — George Eliot

If we have largely forgotten the physical discomforts of the itching, oppressive garments of the past and the corrosive effects of perpetual physical discomfort on the nerves, then we have mercifully forgotten, too, the smells of the past, the domestic odours
ill-washed flesh; infrequently changed underwear; chamber pots; slop-pails; inadequately plumbed privies; rotting food; unattended teeth; and the streets are no fresher than indoors, the omnipresent acridity of horse piss and dung, drains, sudden stench of old death from butchers' shops, the amniotic horror of the fishmonger.
You would drench your handkerchief with cologne and press it to your nose. You would splash yourself with parma violet so that the reek of fleshly decay you always carried with you was overlaid by that of the embalming parlour. You would abhor the air you breathed. — Angela Carter

You know you're going to have to stop smoking too, right?"
"I don't smoke!" It was as if Wilson had heard my thoughts moments before.
Wilson lifted an eyebrow in disbelief, and smirked at me, waiting for me to come clean.
"I don't smoke, Wilson! I just live with someone who smokes like a chimney. So I smell like an ashtray all the time. I can't help it if I reek, but thank you for noticing."
Wilson had lost his doubtful smirk, and he sighed gustily. "I'm sorry, Blue. I'm incredibly good at dropping clunkers. I don't have a big mouth, but somehow I manage to stick my foot in it quite frequently. — Amy Harmon

You reek of lust," Arys commented. The fresh energy rolled off him and tantalized my senses. "What have you been doing in here without me? — Trina M. Lee

We went too far when we put on the fur of lynxes,
Of weasels trapped in winter when they've lost their tan;
We went too far when we let the fox assist us
To warm the hide that houses the soul of Man.

The reek of the leopard and the stink of the inky cat
Striped handsomely with white, are in the concert hall;
We sleekly writhe from under them, and are above all that;
But, the concert over, back into our pelts we crawl. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I love the smell of male urine and the reek of his groin on my bath towels after he'd had a shower — J.G. Ballard

There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all. — Charles Dickens

If theme parks, with their pasteboard main streets, reek of a bland, safe, homogenized, whitebread America, the Renaissance Faire is at the other end of the social spectrum, a whiff of the occult, a flash of danger and a hint of the erotic. Here, they let you throw axes. Here are more beer and bosoms than you'll find in all of Disney World. - Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times — Rachel Lee Rubin

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty! — William Shakespeare

He lifted the slice of cake and bit into it and turned the page. The old musty album with its foxed and crumbling paper seemed to breathe a reek of the vault, turning up one by one these dead faces with their wan and loveless gaze out toward the spinning world, masks of incertitude before the cold glass eye of the camera or recoiling before this celluloid immortality or faces simply staggered into gaga by the sheer velocity of time. Old distaff kin coughed up out of the vortex, thin and cracked and macled and a bit redundant. The landscapes, old backdrops, redundant too, recurring unchanged as if they inhabited another medium than the dry pilgrims shored up on them. Blind moil in the earth's nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races. — Cormac McCarthy

However, the crowds all the while maintained their mouse-tense hush, their air of urgency. Fear. There was a reek of it everywhere, Mosca realized, in every guarded glance or falsely friendly backslap. A clammy smell, like rotten leaves. And everybody went about their lives in spite of it, because fear was part of their lives. — Frances Hardinge

Lovers reeked of each other after they had exchanged body fluids & hormones in the union of love. But men who dined on a girl's Nectar did not exchange body fluids & hormones with her. Thus, although she would not reek of them, they would reek of her. And that was the reason why everyone who had ever tasted Phyllis' Nectar had yearned for her, starting with her earliest lover of all, Saturn.
Whilst Mars pined for her, he felt that he had also been humiliated & humbled by her in public. And so, there was a secret grudge, somewhere in his bosom. It was a strange feeling of love & hate & this explosive mixture within him, always drove him to war.[MMT] — Nicholas Chong

Here the scent of fake roses was underscored with the bright iron reek of blood. — Christa Faust

I have a date,' he explained. 'This is an emergency.' He paused to catch his breath. 'Do you know' - breath - 'how to iron?' I walked over to the pink shirt. It was wrinkled like an old woman who'd spent her youth sunbathing. If only the Colonel didn't ball up his every belonging and stuff it into random dresser drawers. 'I think you just turn it on and press it against the shirt, right?' I said. 'I don't know. I didn't even know we had an iron.' 'We don't. It's Takumi's. But Takumi doesn't know how to iron, either. And when I asked Alaska, she started yelling, "You're not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me." Oh God, I need to smoke. I need to smoke, but I can't reek when I see Sara's parents. Okay, screw it. We're going to smoke in the bathroom with the shower on. The shower has steam. Steam gets rid of wrinkles, right? — John Green

Whenever I saw her face, I felt that I myself had become beautiful. At the mere thought of her, I felt elevated by contact with her nobility. If this strange phenomenon we call Love can be said to have two poles, the higher of which is a sense of holiness and the baser the impulse of sexual desire, this love of mine was undoubtedly in the grip of Love's higher realm. Being human, of course, I could not leave my fleshly self behind, yet the eyes that beheld her, the heart that treasured thoughts of her, knew nothing of the reek of the physical. — Soseki Natsume

We need a bigger gun."
"We need a shower," Raphael said.
"Gun first. Shower later."
Ten minutes later I walked into the Order's office. A group of knights standing in the hallway turned at my approach: Mauro, the huge Samoan knight; Tobias, as usual dapper; and Gene, the seasoned former Georgia Bureau of Investigations detective. They looked at me. The conversation died.
My clothes were torn and bloody. Soot stained my skin. My hair stuck out in clumps caked with dirt and blood. The reek of a dead cat emanated from me in a foul cloud.
I walked past them into the armory, opened the glass case, took Boom Baby out, grabbed a box of Silver Hawk cartridges, and walked out.
Nobody said a thing. — Ilona Andrews

Dorcas, you already reek like a Marseilles cat house; don't wheedle Mike for more stinkum. — Robert A. Heinlein

I was not too crazy about sleeping with girls I didn't know. It was an easy way to take care of my sex drive of course, and I did enjoy all the holding and touching, but I hated the morning after. I'd wake up and find this strange girl sleeping next to me, and the room would reek of alcohol, and the bed and the lighting and the curtains had that special "love hotel" garishness, and my head would be in a hungover fog. — Haruki Murakami

A sense of hopelessness had weighed me down like a fever since I'd stepped across the border weeks before. And with this fever came a vision that had sharpened, coming into greater focus, as if inviting me to look closer. My first reaction was a laugh of disgust at the ugliness around me, like the reek of a latrine that makes you howl or at the sight of a dirty bucket of chicken pieces covered with flies. After the moment of helpless hilarity passed, what remained was the vow that I never wanted to see another place like this. — Paul Theroux

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain - the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed - then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood. — Vladimir Nabokov

Our society tells men they are worthless perverts who reek of male privilege while simultaneously castrating them should they act in a manly manner, and now women are upset because men are becoming more feminized? You reap what you sow. — Helen Smith

If I were to say, "this isn't a sacrifice" at this moment, it would reek of a lie...
... But I hope I'll be able to really say that in a few years' time. — Yumi Unita

To know that we are only angels weighed down by filth, free of guilt? The bacteria in our bellies are responsible for the farts which shame us, tiny monsters shitting in their billions all over our pure skin create the acid reek of "our" sweat. And Slade: when the "inner voices" tell us we're unworthy or instruct us to "love" and "hate," despite our best instincts ... are these incessant distracting thoughts our own? Or do we only hear the voice of the eternal germ screaming in our heads? — Grant Morrison

Both worry and stress reek of arrogance. — Francis Chan

It's easier to hang out with the patients in the indoor garden, with its sunlight and picnic tables. Easier to forget that someone's ill when you're not surrounded by the antiseptic reek of hospital-issue debris. — Corrine Jackson

Ooh, Snowberry, you were right," one of them said, wrinkling her nose like she smelled something foul. "She does reek of a dead pig in the summer. I don't know how Mab can stand it."
Clenching my fists, I tried to keep my cool. I was so not in the mood for this now.God, it's like high school all over again. Will it never end? These are ancient faeries, for Pete's sake, and they're acting like my high school pom squad. — Julie Kagawa

I've always been dissatisfied, I know that. But lately I find that I reek of discontentment. It fills my throat, and it floods my brain. And sometimes I fear there is no longer a dream, but only the discontentment. — David McCullough

When faced with Death, people lose control of their bodily functions - particularly the majority of those men who are known to be brave-hearted. For this reason, the corpse-strewn battlefields that you've depicted thousands of times reek not of blood, gunpowder and heated armor as is assumed, but of shit and rotting flesh. — Orhan Pamuk

Reek took not more than an hour to relate what would've taken the most intelligent man five or six hours
that is, five minutes of speech and the rest of the five hours to recover from the nausea caused by having to utter such shameless rot ... — Sinclair Lewis

Just got back from a 5 day camping trip. No phones, no Internet, no problem. It was great. Now time for a hot shower. I absolutely reek! — Cody Walker

Myrnin, who hadn't said much, suddenly reached out and wrapped his arms around her.
She stiffened, shocked, and for a panicked second wondered whether he'd suddenly decided to snack on her neck ... but it was just a hug.
His body felt cold against hers, and way too close, but then he let go and stepped back. "You've done very well. I'm extremely proud of you," he said. There was a touch of color high in his pale cheeks. "Do go home now. And shower. You reek like the dead."
Which, coming from a vampire, was pretty rich. — Rachel Caine

Jabbo and Bungalow came in out of the weather in a bathless reek of cold wool and splo whiskey. — Cormac McCarthy

The ecology of the valley was complex beyond our understanding, and it began to die as we went on manipulating it in ever more frantic ways. As it went dead and empty of the old life it became a place where no one wanted to live. In our right minds we want to seek out places that reek of complexity. Our drive to industrialize soured and undercut the intimacies that drew most people to country life in the first place. — William Kittredge