Quotes & Sayings About Smell And Memories

Books, be they physical objects or electronic pulses, are way cool. They are idea houses. So let those who want to read from machines. Those who love the feel, the smell, the gilt edging and the pretty covers and the soft paper, and the kinetic memories will enjoy the physical objects. Either form can be artifact. So long as we're all reading, and gaining joy from it, does it really matter so much? — Wendy Welch

Good thoughts are blessed guests, and should be heartily welcomed, well fed, and much sought after. Like rose leaves, they give out a sweet smell if laid up in the jar of memory. — Charles Spurgeon

How could I explain to a beautiful lady in a silk dress that when I picked up her baby girl, I felt that lady's long-ago chubby shape in my arms, smelled her sunshine-touched hair? That years and years of tiny memories flitted past my heart like a flock of birds spinning on invisible air? It was the smell of the little girls, slightly wet, somewhat soapy, the smell of porridge supper, and the taste of kissed-away tears. Here in my arms were the best parts of life, going on, blooming like a strong tree. — Nancy E. Turner

In her eyes was the reflection of everything that mattered: old diners with neon signs, vinyl records, celluloid film, drive-in movies, Pears soap, department stores, her brother's old blue Camaro car and the smell of coal dust in the rainy sky of a summer lightning storm.
... And all the nice bright colors of the past that she thought were gone for good came flowing back into her life like a wave of nostalgia flooding over her, reds, yellows, blues and greens drenching her gray memories in psychedelic ribbons and glittering fireworks.
... She hoped that the world would always hold those miniscule yet beautiful, deep and mysterious traces of memory. — Rebecca McNutt

The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection. — Lewis Thomas

I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there. — Michael Chabon

Perfume is magic. It's mystery. We recreate the smell of a flower. Of wood. Of grass. We capture the essence of life. Liquefy it. We store memories. We make dreams," he told her once. "What we do is a wonder, an art, and we have a responsibility to do it well. — M.J. Rose

It's funny how you can remember special things about a person. It's Mama's hands I remember. When I was little and she'd dress me, her hands would be all up under my chin fastnin up my shirt. I'd smell the Clorox. I hated it because it made the inside of my nose burn. She said it didn't bother her and maybe one day I'd get used to it. Sometimes now, I run a little water in the sink. Then I add some Clorox and let my hands splash around in it. And then I smell. Long, deep breaths. I smell Mama. — Sandi Morgan Denkers

Sense memories of you persist and do not seem to abate as the day progresses. It's disconcerting, Camilla. I don't like it when my mind plays tricks on me. I would much rather simply have you here in the flesh, to feel and taste and smell with my actual senses. Instead my mind keeps conjuring this false perception of your presence. I think it means I miss you. — Delphine Dryden

Sometimes, you think you have forgotten everything, that the rust and dust of the years have destroyed all the things we once entrusted to their voracious appetite. But all it takes is a noise, a smell, a sudden, unexpected touch, and suddenly the alluvion of time sweeps pitilessly over us, and our memories light up with all the brilliance and fury of a lightning flash — Julio Llamazares

When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered ... the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls ... bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory — Marcel Proust

Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. — Diane Ackerman

Smell is important. It reminds a person of all the things he's been through; it is a sheath of memories and security. — Tove Jansson

Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Sooner or later your fingers close on that one moist-cold spud that the spade has accidentally sliced clean through, shining wetly white and giving off the most unearthly of earthly aromas. It's the smell of fresh soil in the spring, but fresh soil somehow distilled or improved upon, as if that wild, primordial scene has been refined and bottled: eau de pomme de terre. You can smell the cold inhuman earth in it, but there's the cozy kitchen to, for the smell of potatoes is, at least by now, to us, the smell of comfort itself, a smell as blankly welcoming as spud flesh, a whiteness that takes up memories and sentiments as easily as flavors. To smell a raw potato is to stand on the very threshold of the domestic and the wild. (241) — Michael Pollan

Sometimes I accidentally walk into the places where I and you had spoken before, existed before, which still have the smell of
your memories, all of a sudden it starts feeling like I have entered a dark room without a door anywhere. Where I can always hear that song I used to love once before. — Akshay Vasu

The Wise County Bookmobile is one of the most beautiful sights in the world to me. When I see it lumbering down the mountain road like a tank ... I flag it down like an old friend. I've waited on this corner every Friday since I can remember. The Bookmobile is just a government truck, but to me it's a glittering royal coach delivering stories and knowledge and life itself. I even love the smell of books. People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count on the Bookmobile. — Adriana Trigiani

Certain moments in my life are imprinted in me memory.
They're easy to recall with perfect clarity, whether I want to remember them or not. Any small thing can trigger them: a phrase, a smell, a thought. It brings everything back like I'm reliving that moment, a brief scene in the movie of my life, complete with how horrible I felt at the time. And I usually felt horrible in those moments that I want to forget that stick around. — Elizabeth Norris

Giles: Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a - it, uh, it has no no texture, no-no context. It's-it's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly. — Joss Whedon

THERE ARE MEMORIES we cannot escape. We take them with us wherever we go, however far, like it or not. They pursue us or accompany us in good times and in bad. We smell their scents. We hear their sounds. We delight in them or dread them. By day and by night. My — Jan-Philipp Sendker

Memories were fine but you couldn't touch them, smell them or hold them. They were never exactly as the moment was, and they faded with time. — Cecelia Ahern

Hink back through your own life, to when you were eight or nine years old. See if the memories you have are the ones you might expect. or if they are fragments, dislocated moments, a smell here, a feeling there. The unlikeliest conversations and places. We don't choose what we keep - not at that age. Not ever, really. — Nathan Filer

Elephants also have the necessary neural anatomy for long-term memories - their brains have especially large and complex frontal lobes, which are important for storing and retrieving memories of scent, touch, smell, and sound. There's little doubt that elephants have prodigious memories. — Virginia Morell

Danilo's was the kind of place where many drinking men come to hide, be it from their wives, in-laws, their jobs or life in general. it was where men and women can come to drink poison as if it was the only form of medicine available to remedy the migraine headache called life. The lighting dim and secluded, mostly covering the tables, counters and the door to the bathroom. The walls were decorated in decades of memories, favorite sports teams and other miscellaneous decor that was typical of small bars such as this one. It was too dark to tell what they were from a distance.
There was a thick layer of smoke hovering in the air around the ceiling lights, the place was smothered in it but was strongest above everyone's heads. The smell was the classic stale bar odor of cigarettes and cheap cigars. — J.C. Joranco

As usual, Vanderhyde's memory was sharp enough when it suited him. 'That's true. All the same, you were there.' 'Yes, I was. But I left several hours before the fire started. Not guilty, your honour.' 'Why were you there in the first place?' 'To meet a friend for a drink.' 'A seedy place for a drink.' 'Was it? You'll have to remember, Inspector, I couldn't see anything. It certainly didn't smell or feel particularly disreputable.' 'Point taken.' 'I had my memories. To me, it was the same old Central Hotel I'd lunched in and danced in. I quite enjoyed the evening. — Ian Rankin

I woke up to an ache in my chest, the smell of chocolate, and the sound of the ghost making a racket in the kitchen. Now, I'm not the sort to dwell on doom and sorrow. Life is too short for that. But I should at least try to describe the ache briefly: It is not the kind that comes from eating tacos too late at night. It's the kind that comes from being left behind. I think my heart is smart enough to know there's a place I should be filling with new memories, new jokes, and wondrous adventures with the one person I loved most of all. But that person is gone now. And so, my heart has a giant hole. I call it The Big Empty. — Natalie Lloyd

Absolutely, I think that is where a scent is so powerful because it harnesses our memory and our memory is a very emotional place. I do like the smell of excitement. — Cate Blanchett

All our lives we are engaged in preserving our experiences and keeping them fresh by artificially sprinkling the water of memory over them. They have ceased to retain their original smell and fragrance. Do you call it life- this effort at the preservation of a phantom freshness in something that is withered and gone? — Vimala Thakar

Smell is the primordial sense, more powerful, more primitive, more intimately tied to our memories and emotions than any other. A scent can trigger spiritual, emotional or physical peace and stimulate healing and wellness. — Donna Karan

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away. — Helen Keller

A red veil covers the room as walls, which flow but do not stand. Screams echo from every stone. Incense I smell of sandalwood and lavender, and lavender I taste as well. A tea, a brew, or a liquid I sip. Calm I feel. Gyfu shows a great sacrifice will be made. I feel tied in knots as light reflects from crystals found in rock. All is not what it seems. Choices are made, the white handled bolline swings, the steps slide, gates swing open, memories flow like rain - betrayal and it is done.
A quote by Gannon reciting his vision — Wynter Wilkins

The images are visual, auditory, olfactory, kinesthetic. They aren't laid down on the same tracks as thought. And sometimes, when they return to you, it is as if you feel them for the very first time. Memory lives on in the details, like the color of a room, a tone of a voice, the touch of a child, the smell of a man. — Martha Manning

A memory from my youth comes back to me. You go into the woods on a bike, with a girl. There is the smell of heather, you can hear the wind in the fir trees, you don't dare tell her about your love, but you feel happy, as if you were floating above the ground. Then you look at the clouds beyond the trees and they are fleeting. And you know that within an hour you'll have to go home, that tomorrow will be a working day. You wish you could stop that moment forever, but you can't, it is bound to end. So you take a photo, as if to challenge time. — Robert Doisneau

Me and Mama never did like the smell of cigarettes but after Daddy died, sometimes we would light one up and put it in his old ashtray. Today I stayed behind the man at Fletcher's and waited a little while in the cloud of smoke. — Sandi Morgan Denkers

A man is made of memories. It is all we are. Captured moments, the smell of a place, scenes played out time and again on a small stage. We are memories, strung on storylines
the tales we tell ourselves about ourselves, falling through our lives into tomorrow. — Mark Lawrence

His knees locked and he pushed his weight against Mr. Jones's hand. It wasn't the dim light coming through the skylights or the giant steel fan that waited to chop them up or the smell of urine or the dank-dungeon cells that lined both sides of the aisle that made Danny step back. It was a sense of panic, of fear, that saturated the atmosphere like an electrical current, tingling in his bowels. The boys ahead of him didn't seize up, but they stutter-stepped. Like the end of a ship's plank was dead ahead. Danny felt this type of fear spreading through his groin like cold fingers once before. A memory emerged in the soupy sea of memories inside his head. He remembered getting pulled out of the back seat of a car with his hands cuffed behind his back by someone. But then like everything he tried to remember, there were gaps. — Tony Bertauski

Smell brings to mind ... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. — Diane Ackerman

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

Smell is the sense of memory and desire. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The whiff of ocean on the southern breeze and the smell of burning asphalt brought back memories of summers past. It had seemed as though those sweet dreams of summer would last forever: the warmth of a girl's skin, an old rock 'n' roll song, freshly washed button-down shirt, the odor of cigarette smoke in a pool changing room, a fleeting premonition. Then one summer (when had it been?) the dreams had vanished, never to return. — Haruki Murakami

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it's a pity we use it so little. — Rachel Carson

Forget? No." Conner frowned. "It has been decades, and I still remember every detail about her: her smell, her touch, the way her voice hummed in my ears. Why would I want to forget any of that? Those memories are my treasures. — H.L. Burke

The internet. Can we trust in that? Of course not. Give it six months and we'll probably discover Google's sewn together by orphans in sweatshops. Or that Wi-Fi does something horrible to your brain, like eating your fondest memories and replacing them with drawings of cross-eyed bats and a strong smell of puke. There's surely a great dystopian sci-fi novel yet to be written about a world in which it's suddenly discovered that wireless broadband signals deaden the human brain, slowly robbing us of all emotion, until after 10 years of exposure we're all either rutting in stairwells or listlessly reversing our cars over our own offspring with nary the merest glimmer of sympathy or pain on our faces. It'll be set in Basingstoke and called, Cuh, Typical. — Charlie Brooker

I'd seen old Yardley Slickers- the makeup now just a waxy crumble- sell for almost one hundred dollars on the internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it- to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been, still existed inside of them.

There were so many things that returned me. The tang of soy, the smoke in someone's hair, the grassy hills turning blond in June. An arrangement of oaks and boulders could, seen out of the corner of my eye, crack open something in my chest, palms going suddenly slick with adrenaline. — Emma Cline

Three scents accompany my memories of this place: cut wood, poppy-seed bread, and the soft, crisp smell of snow. — Elif Shafak

Smell can conjure up memories for me stronger than any other sense. Especially childhood memories. Perhaps because you were that much shorter and therefore closer to the ground and its smells. — Lilli Palmer

In humans, smell is often viewed as an aesthetic sense, as a sense capable of eliciting enduring thoughts and memories. Smell, however, is the primal sense. It is the sense that affords most organisms the ability to detect food, predators, and mates. — Richard Axel

[Think] of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else could you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Every bit of you has been replaced many times over (which is why you eat, of course). You are not even the same shape as you were then. The point is that you are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, while simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important. — Steve Grand

Dogman remembered the smell of her hair, the sound of her laugh, the feel of her back, pressed warm and soft against his belly while she slept. Well-used memories, picked over and worn thin like a favourite shirt. — Joe Abercrombie

There are some things that don't change much. I find the smell of a dish, or the way a certain spice is crushed, or just a quick look at the way something has been put on a plate, can pull me back to another place and time. I love those memories that seem so far away, yet you can hold them and carry them with you, even forget them, and then, with a single taste or hint or a smell, be chaperoned back to a beautiful moment. — Tessa Kiros

She learned how to deal with the moments when his memory lapsed. Sometimes, she felt it happen even without him saying a word. On a sunny fall day, she lay next to him on the ground, and as he dozed she felt his old life, his memories, radiate off his skin. She felt everything leave him but her. She shed her own life, too, to match him. They lay there together like a point in time. A cloud drifted in front of the sun and things to shift inside of him, and when she sensed this, she allowed things to shift inside of her, too. They became their regular selves again, still warm from the lost memory of a minute ago.
But underneath her happiness was a dread that one day this would be all they had. All associations would be lost: the smell of the gloves, the sound of the truck door slamming shut. All the details she still wanted to know. Everything reduced to nothing more than itself. — Emily Ruskovich

Already many of the memories of the previous two weeks had faded: the smell of that small hotel in St. Andrews; that mixture of bacon cooking for breakfast and the lavender-scented soap in the bathroom; the air from the sea drifing across the golf course; the aroma of coffee in the coffee bar in South Street. She should have noted them down. She should have said something about all that and the light and the hills with sheep on them like small white stones. — Alexander McCall Smith

I was six years old when my mother died. For a long time afterward, the sweet and earthy magnolia scent of her would permeate my dreams. No matter what I was dreaming about, good or frightening, my mother's smell would waft through my nighttime adventures, infusing them with her unseen presence, reassuring me even through their darkest moments. I never told anyone about this. I felt that, somehow, my mother had found a way to communicate with me from heaven even though I knew from the down-to-earth practicality of my Baptist Sunday School lessons that it was likely impossible. Still, I have heard it said more than once that with God, nothing is impossible. Is it so hard to imagine that He, in His infinite compassion, might have, for a moment in time, comforted a scared little girl with her mother's familiar scent? — Earlene Fowler

Why do we remember the Boys of Summer? We remember because we were young when they were, of course. But more, we remember because we feel the ache of guilt and regret. While they were running, jumping, leaping, we were slouched behind typewriters, smoking and drinking, pretending to some mystic communion with men we didn't really know or like. Men from ghettos we didn't dare visit, or rural farms we passed at sixty miles an hour. Loving what they did on the field, we could forget how superior we felt towards them the rest of the time. By cheering them on we proved we had nothing to do with the injustices that kept their lives separate from ours. There's nothing sordid or false about the Boys of Summer. Only our memories smell like sweaty jockstraps. — Roger Kahn

When I smell pho, I just automatically think of my mom. All these nostalgic feelings and memories come rushing through my head. — Michelle Phan

Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn't diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished. — Sally Mann

I understand the nostalgia of having paper to feel and smell when you read it, but I would rather have fond memories of newspapers that have become obsolete than fond memories of beautiful forests that have become obsolete. — Jasika Nicole

The tea-infused steam was another smell that brought back a fistful of memories, and I let them come. Better to open the door for them, even if they are sad, than to let them burn your house down from the outside. — Alexander Gordon Smith

They say that our sense of smell is one of the strongest triggers of memories. Of course, our sense of smell is integral to our sense of taste, so it is no surprise, then, that in a life full of moving and traveling, food has always been a source of familiar comfort for me. — Philippe Cousteau Jr.