Quotes & Sayings About Stench

We came to find me home, boy, but this is not the place. Me people once lived, here, 'tis true, but the darkness that creeped into Mithral Hall has put an end to me claim on it. I've no wish to return once I'm clear of the stench of the place, know that in yer stubborn head. — R.A. Salvatore

Strangers complained about the stench, but the locals liked to brag that it was the sweet smell of money. — Donald Ray Pollock

The mind Is so hospitable, taking in everything Like boarders, and you don't see until It's all over how little there was to learn Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated. — John Ashbery

I smell guilt. There is a stench of guilt upon the air.
I see you all, whole and healthy, with your powers intact - such prompt appearances! - and I ask myself ... why did this band of wizards never come to the aid of their master, to whom they swore eternal loyalty? And I answer myself, they must have believed me broken, they thought I was gone. They slipped back among my enemies, and they pleaded innocence, and ignorance, and bewitchment ...
And then I ask myself, but how could they have believed I would not rise again? They, who knew the steps I took, long ago, to guard myself against mortal death? They, who had seen proofs of the immensity of my power in the times when I was mightier than any wizard living? And I answer myself, perhaps they believed a still greater power could exist, one that could vanquish even Lord Voldemort ... perhaps they now pay allegiance to another ... — J.K. Rowling

Show me a quest for personal immortality and I'll show you a path through a slaughterhouse, and the incense of personal divinity is the stench of other people's corpses. — Barry Hughart

Something lived in there, all right. He could smell it, a stench that made him think of damp plaster and moldering sofas and ancient mattresses rotting beneath half-liquid coats of mildew. It was familiar, that smell. — Stephen King

To someone who grows up by the stockyards, that smell just smells like air. You don't know what a younger person might someday think of you, and whatever stench we still breathe in without noticing. — Laura Moriarty

He could not bear to search for Christ again in stench and hollow eyes; for the Christ of pus and bleeding excrement, the Christ who could not be. In — William Peter Blatty

Bad news is, they've figured out I'm alive. Worse news, I can't be sure about them. Their decomposing stench burns my throat. They don't sound very big. Maybe they're pygmy zombies. — A.G. Howard

A culture of secrecy is like the bad stench created by cat pee - it is very difficult to get rid of. — Pierre De Vos

Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it. — Dick Gregory

I'll lick a leper's neck before I take a lung-full o' your stench, Brother Row. — Mark Lawrence

Step forward again, hold the shield steady. Peer over the top. Fear is screaming somewhere deep. Ignore it. You can smell the shit now. Shit and blood, the stench of glory. The enemy is more frightened. Kill them. Keep the shields steady. Kill. — Bernard Cornwell

If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste for death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin's answer. — Yann Martel

The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, gentle light glimmers in the ravines among the clouds, the banners of the sunset are fluttering above our heads. The stench of yesterday's blood and slaughtered horses drips into the evening chill. — Isaac Babel

Many authors write like amateur blacksmiths making their first horseshoe; the clank of the anvil, the stench of the scorched leather apron, the sparks and the cursing are palpable, and this appeals to those who rank "sincerity" very high. Nabokov is more like a master swordsmith making a fine blade; nothing is amiss, nothing is too much, there is no fuss, and the finished product must be handled with great care, or it will cut you badly. — Robertson Davies

I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them - the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings. — Thomas Merton

I was brought up Catholic and know the stench of the Catholic Church. I moved away from religion early, but the impression remains. — Gunter Grass

When evil enters the world, do you think it comes with horns and cloven feet, billowing some foul stench? — Zia Haider Rahman

I said get out, damn it," Dad repeated, spittle flying from his mouth. "I won't have a sixteen-year-old boy bawl'n like a little girl all the way home. Man up or walk." Too much wine had left Dad's teeth and lips stained red, and Shane could smell the alcohol, even over the foul stench of Jackie's cigarette. His aunt had whispered an apology to Shane at the funeral reception, saying she'd only put wine out because she didn't think his dad would drink it. What she didn't realize was Dad had become such a raging alcoholic that he would've — N.W. Harris

If you threw your shoe to someone's head, you spread your own stench." ~ Angelica Hopes, If I Could Tell You — Angelica Hopes

Living in filth was regarded by great numbers of holy men, who set an example to the Church and to society, as an evidence of sanctity. St. Jerome and the Breviary of the Roman Church dwell with unction on the fact that St. Hilarion lived his whole life long in utter physical uncleanliness; St. Athanasius glorifies St. Anthony because he had never washed his feet; St. Abraham's most striking evidence of holiness was that for fifty years he washed neither his hands nor his feet; St. Sylvia never washed any part of her body save her fingers; St. Euphraxia belonged to a convent in which the nuns religiously abstained from bathing. St. Mary of Egypt was emninent for filthiness; St. Simon Stylites was in this respect unspeakable - the least that can be said is, that he lived in ordure and stench intolerable to his visitors. — Andrew Dickson White

Dirge of the dying and the stench of fear,
Black souls repent as hell draws near,
- Percy Pemmeney the smuggler, from Curse of Ancient Shadows. — Rod Tyson

He got to his feet and stumbled away from the stench of his vomit, making his way through this graveyard of old glories, heading for the darkest place he could find in which to hide his giddy head. — Clive Barker

The stench in the air grew steadily stronger, and the dark about us seemed to press like wool, as if jealous of the light which had temporarily deposed it after so many years of undisputed dominion. — Stephen King

Good thing about bad rubbish is you can make the stench go away just by covering it up. It never comes back as long as you keep a tight lid on it. — Neal Shusterman

A bus drives past and I'm nauseated by a whiff of exhaust. Then rotting fish. The rancid stench of sewage. Is it garbage day? I'm trapped in the pungent fog, in the dreary suburban-style shops, the rat race of city life. The city, even on the west coast, has the power to beat us down, to suck us of passion, to crush our dreams. — Shannon Mullen

Words have power, for better or worse.
Like the smell of fresh rain on cut grass,
Or the stench of a decaying corpse,
Like the soft comfort of a warm blanket on your shoulders,
Or the agony of a dagger splitting your chest in two.
Use them wisely. — David Estes

Run. Flee. Fuck off. Vanish from my presence and take the foul stench of your sordid secret with you. — St John Morris

He was not used to the smell of dragon breath, which is best described as a combination of the stench of burning rubber and the stink of old socks, with overtones of a hamster cage in dire need of a cleaning. — Angie Sage

The dissolute and unlawful king came: Herod! I saw him with my own eyes when he called me to Jericho to heal him. I took along my secret herbs - I knew all about such lore - and went. I went, and from that day on, I have not been able to eat meat, for I saw his putrescent flesh; I have not been able to drink wine, for I saw his blood filled with worms. I have retained his stench in my nostrils for over thirty years. — Nikos Kazantzakis

Francie of course became an outsider shunned by all because of her stench. But she had grown accostumed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and being considered different. She did not suffer to much. — Betty Smith

She used to recite the poem as a schoolgirl in England until she heard that it derived from the Great Plague of London in 1665. Allegedly, a ring around the rosie was a reference to a rose-colored pustule on the skin that developed a ring around it and indicated that one was infected. Sufferers would carry a pocketful of posies in an effort to mask the smell of their own decaying bodies as well as the stench of the city itself, where hundreds of plague victims dropped dead daily, their bodies then cremated. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. — Dan Brown

Mortals are strange creatures; they cling to life even when that life is nothing but pain and misery, yet they will throw away their lives for a word, an idea, even a flag. Wolves piss to mark their territory. Smell the stench of another pack and wolves will quietly slink away. Why risk a fight when it might maim or kill you? But humans will slash and slaughter in their thousands to plant their little piece of cloth on a hill or hang it from a battlement. — Karen Maitland

There is here a striving,avid and worldly civilisation, of course; these huge and eager markets, to this incessant buying and selling, that make that self evident; but I had no conception of the ubiquitous sense of the holy, no notion of how another world can permeate the secular. Filth, stench, disease,"gross superstition" as our people say, extreme poverty, promiscuous universal defecation, do not affect it: nor do they affect my sense of humanity with which I am surrounded. What an agreeable city it is, where a man may walk around naked in the heat if it so please him — Patrick O'Brian

Tomorrow at seven o'clock a strange phenomenon will occur: the earth is going to sit on the moon. This has also been written about by the noted English chemist Wellington. I confess, I felt troubled at heart when I pictured to myself the extraordinary delicacy and fragility of the moon. For the moon is usually made in Hamburg, and made quite poorly. I'm surprised England doesn't pay attention to this. It's made by a lame cooper, and one can see that the fool understands nothing about the moon. He used tarred rope and a quantity of cheap olive oil, and that's why there's a terrible stench all over the earth, so that you have to hold your nose. And that's why the moon itself is such a delicate sphere that people can't live on it, and now only noses live there. And for the same reason, we can't see our own noses, for they're all in the moon. — Nikolai Gogol

It's a dungeon, Leila. They're Supposed to smell.
Mission accomplished. The stench might have actually killed my new appetite. If hell could fart, it would smell like this. — Jeaniene Frost

he could see the darkness pulse, and the smell of decay had thickened to a stench. — Steven Erikson

Losing Grandma, just when I'd found her again. A waterfall of flowers brightened her funeral, but they couldn't disguise the stench of death. — Ellen Hopkins

The stench that surrounded me suggested that the tarp over my face had been previously used either to transport fertiliser or as toilet paper. — Annabel Monaghan

The top bag popped, and a metric ton of old lasagna spilled onto my pants. The stench of soured spaghetti sauce washed over me. Ew. Of all the trash from this whole giant building, I had to step on a bag from the food court. Damn it. — Ilona Andrews

The road was clogged with limbers and motor vehicles and men marching towards the front. They look like a machine: all the boots moving as one, shoulders bristling with rifles, arms swinging, everything pointing forwards. And on the other side of the road, men stumbling back, trying to keep time, half dead from exhaustion and with this incredible stench hanging over them. You get whiffs of it when you cut the clothes off wounded men, but out there, in the mass, it's as solid as a wall. And they all look so gray, faces twitching, young men who've been turned into old men. It's a great contrast, stark and terrible, because they're the same men, really. It's an irrigation system, full buckets going one way, empty buckets the other. Only it's not water the buckets carry. — Pat Barker

I do not like the killers, and the killing bravely and well crap. I do not like the bully boys, the Teddy Roosevelt's, the Hemingways, the Ruarks. They are merely slightly more sophisticated versions of the New Jersey file clerks who swarm into the Adirondacks in the fall, in red cap, beard stubble and taut hero's grin, talking out of the side of their mouths, exuding fumes of bourbon, come to slay the ferocious white-tailed deer. It is the search for balls. A man should have one chance to bring something down. He should have his shot at something, a shining running something, and see it come a-tumbling down, all mucus and steaming blood stench and gouted excrement, the eyes going dull during the final muscle spasms. And if he is, in all parts and purposes, a man, he will file that away as a part of his process of growth and life and eventual death. And if he is perpetually, hopelessly a boy, he will lust to go do it again, with a bigger beast. — John D. MacDonald

It was not a purer realm that loomed vastly over the city. Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into that upper world as if out of spite. In a thicker, stinking haze just above the rooftops, the detritus from a million low chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt. — China Mieville

Some people are like gravity; they draw you into a room with a hop in your step and a smile on your face. Others are like the stench of sulfur; they make you scowl and want to swivel on the balls of your feet towards a quick exit. Have you stopped to think if you are gravity or sulfur? — Richelle E. Goodrich

To read a lot of trash mixing the blood of war with business's stench. To root out any happiness. To go out, and down, and on the road. To hesitate; to go on, and ahead, and back, and up the stairs, and in one's room. On the way, to notice that the mountain is still there. To lie and sleep, deeply, heavily. To reproduce night's sleep. To wake up, look through the window at green water, from the Bay to the mountain, and return to one's self. To remember that war is devastating Irak. To feel pain. — Etel Adnan

There are precious lessons deep in the stench of failure and the filth of selfish choices. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

And the old horror of being a professional writer, and the usual stench of words that goes with it, is begining to drive me out of my seat. (Buddy) — J.D. Salinger

Noise: a stench in the ear. — Ambrose Bierce

If you read any poetry or stories coming out these days, you know what I mean when I say that you can smell the stench of liquor coming from the words they write. And underneath their sentences lies a pile of chicken and goat bones, and the skeletons of the innocent ones. If you poke the head of the broom into contemporary literature, you'll find a hollow wall stuffed full of money - impure, dirty money. — Uday Prakash

rhyme jumped into Sienna's mind: Ring around the rosie. A pocketful of posies. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. She used to recite the poem as a schoolgirl in England until she heard that it derived from the Great Plague of London in 1665. Allegedly, a ring around the rosie was a reference to a rose-colored pustule on the skin that developed a ring around it and indicated that one was infected. Sufferers would carry a pocketful of posies in an effort to mask the smell of their own decaying bodies as well as the stench of the city itself, where hundreds of plague victims dropped dead daily, their bodies then cremated. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. Ring around the rosie. A pocketful of posies. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. — Dan Brown

C'mon, friend. It's two on one. You sure don't look like you're up to those odds. (Stranger)
You can't be talking to me. I don't have prokas for friends. And I assure you I could gut you both before your stench had time to catch up to your fall. (Syn) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

An oppressive odor of decay now mingled with the stench of mold and seemed to clutch at the very breath in their lungs. — Kaoru Kurimoto

Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards. — Barbara Kingsolver

In ten years [i.e., 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. — Paul R. Ehrlich

And the betrayers of language ... n and the press gang And those who had lied for hire; The perverts, the perverters of language, the perverts, who have set money-lust Before the pleasures of the senses; howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house, the clatter of presses, the blowing of dry dust and stray paper, foetor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges. — Ezra Pound

The air was heavy with unstable chemicals, mold, and the earthy stench of hashish. The fat of candles burned, great tears of wax spilling onto the sidewalk. — Patti Smith

O, vile! These tauntauns have an awful stench outside, But nothing did I know of wretchedness, Disgusting rot, and sick'ning filth till this New smell hath made attack upon my nose. — Ian Doescher

When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin. — Cyril Connolly

Finally, the lock clicked and she tugged the secret door open. A rotten stench hit her like a fist. She drew away. The boy at her side recoiled, afraid. Sarah fell to her knees. Sarah could not speak, she could only quiver, her fingers covering her eyes, her nose, blocking out the smell ... She sank to her knees again and she screamed at the top of her lungs, she screamed, for her mother, for her father, screamed for Michel. — Tatiana De Rosnay

And oh, heaven - the crowded playhouse, the stench of perfume upon heated bodies, the silly laughter and the clatter, the party in the Royal box - the King himself present - the impatient crowd in the cheap seats stamping and shouting for the play to begin while they threw orange peel on to the stage. — Daphne Du Maurier

Grief he had always thought of as an emotion, a mood, something that possessed you but that you eventually escaped. Now he knew it was different. Grief was a country, a place you entered hesitantly, or were thrown into without warning. But once you were there, amidst the roiling formless blackness and stench of despair, you could not leave. Even if you wanted to: you could only walk and walk and walk, traveling on through the black reaches with the sound of screaming in your ears, and hope that someday you might glimpse far off another country, another place where you might someday rest. — Elizabeth Hand

Sarah'. She had thought they had thrown that bit of history into the trash, and the trash into the incinerator. But apparently 'Sarah' had only been thrown into a plastic bag and left in the closet under the bathroom sink, where the packet gathered mold and fungus and slowly acquired a signature stink. That stench was now slowly escaping from between the gap of the doors and the bathroom floor.
Sarah was Siddharth's ex. — Shweta Ganesh Kumar

Stand by your own honorable convictions before the putrid stench of others permanently stains you. — Hank Bracker

Lor blows in like he was plastered to the other side of the door.
"Escort the kid to clean the fuck up and get that stench off her."
"Sure thing, boss."
He scowls at me.
I scowl right back.
Lor points through the glass floor. "See that blonde down there with the big tits? I was about to get laid."
"One, I'm too young to hear that kind of stuff, and two, I don't see you carrying a club to knock her over the head with, so how were you going to accomplish that?"
Behind me, Ryodan laughs.
"You're ruining my night, kid."
"Ditto. Ain't life at Chester's grand. — Karen Marie Moning

Let them come. We've got helicopters, tanks, jets, and big guns. We've got armies of robots. What do they have but their stench and the squalor they live in? — Michael Monroe

I've dreamed again of being in hell, vast cliffs with eyes, iron streets populated with gargoyles, half-dressed harpies, and in the streets chariots going of themselves, spitting the stench of pitch and sulphur — Michael Gruber

Alaric had his head up, sniffing the wind. "The stench of death lies heavy on the air." Luke — Cassandra Clare

Evil had a scent, bitter and pungent, like the scorched earth after a forest fire. I'd been living with the stench long enough to recognize it anywhere. — Lisa Kessler

At a distance, we see a need and ignore it. We judge it, condemn it, forget it. We don't think about it, because if we practice ignorance long enough, we don't notice the need anymore. It goes underground, and we're content with the surface of life as we know it - unwilling to break deeper ground. If all appears to be well on the outside, that is good enough for our consciences.
... If we are willing to dig deep, to find Calcutta in our own backyards, we will find the poor. But we will also find God. And He may just open our eyes, so that we can see the need and not soon forget. So that we can hear their cries and not grow deaf. So that we can smell the stench of human need and awaken our hearts to compassion. — Jeff Goins

I'm slowly becoming a repository for decomposing sorrows, regrets, ignored injustice, and forgotten promises. I can still feel its stench. But when I get accustomed to it, I will call it experience. — Mesa Selimovic

Now, you can stand it when your body emits a stench before you realize it, or when it festers and becomes pussy and completely pollutes your skin. You make allowances for all this. In fact, this only increases your concern and love for your body; you wait on it and wash it, and you endure and help in every way you can. Why not do the same with the spouse whom God has given you, who is an even greater treasure and whom you have even more reason to love? — Martin Luther

It's so easy to demonstrate your own righteousness and it's so easy to challenge the social order when all you're doing is picking on idiots who are better off ignored and left to wither in the stench of their own lives! You — Jarett Kobek

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

It is not known why motorists, who sing the joys of the open road, spend so much petrol every week-end grinding their way to Southend and Brighton and Margate, in the stench of each other's exhausts, one hand on the horn and one foot on the brake, their eyes starting from their orbits in the nerve-racking search for cops, corners, blind turnings, and cross-road suicides. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Albertus [Magnus] ... debased the doctrine of Aristotle with the itch of the chemists flowing with the bloody flux of quicksilver and the stench of sulphur. — Georgius Agricola

It was now late evening and Erika still couldn't sleep, one of the reasons was because of Shigeru, she had passed by his room and heard his unbearable screams as the spikes of bamboo were pulled out from his body followed by the strong stench of blood, she caused this to happen to him, during her bath Yukari told her not to blame herself for this, but it was, if she wasn't here then this would have never happened. — Tarynne Bourret

What spreads the stench of bad conduct? It is the egoism and other 'flaws'. — Dada Bhagwan

The monster towered ten or twelve feet tall. Its bright green leathery skin was covered in dirt,
moss, leaves, and patches of grass, the stench repulsive. His teeth gleamed brown. Evidently he
wasn't aware of the multitude of whitening products on the market. — A&E Kirk

A modern hospital is like Grand Central Station - all noise and hubbub, and is filled with smoking physicians, nurses, orderlies, patients and visitors. Soft drinks are sold on each floor and everybody guzzles these popular poisons. The stench of chemicals offends the nose, while tranquillizers substitute for quietness. — Herbert M. Shelton

And Francie whispered yeah in agreement. She was proud of that smell. It let her know that nearby was a waterway, which, dirty though it was, joined a river that flowed out to the sea. To her, the stupendous stench suggested far-sailing ships and adventure and she was pleased with the smell. — Betty Smith

It smelled like a slaughterhouse. I was standing in the interrogation room of Saddam Hussein's Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. A stench of blood and death permeated my senses, my clothes, my being. — Bernard B. Kerik

His smell - the scent of a demon, cinnamon incense, amber musk - wrapped around me, filled my lungs. I felt like I could breathe again, without every breath being tainted by the stench of dying cells. The smell of him seemed to coat my abused insides with peace, and flow down into the middle of my body to spread through my veins. I filled my lungs again. While I could, before what was undoubtedly a hallucination vanished. — Lilith Saintcrow

He breathed in hard. The stench of blood filled his lungs. Only now, for the first time, could he truly appreciate it. — Shane K.P. O'Neill

Upright, she's slapped with the aroma of musk and sweat. It's the good hunky, 'shirtless man building a dollhouse for his daughter' kind of perspiration, not the 'he just mowed the lawn' kind of stench. — Sandy Ward Bell

God, it stinks," I said, hand over my nose as he pulled me into a long step. Al strode forward, head high. "It's the stench of bureaucracy, my itchy-witch, and why I chose to go into human resources when but a wee lad. — Kim Harrison

She descended the steps two at a time, pushed away the gloom and counted the cracks in the cobbled road, trying to block out the cold and the stench of dishonesty bred in men. — Sharon Robards

On westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefold and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London's public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dime evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle sheel of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleasing glare of the twentieth century. — Graham Moore

A typical plague victim developed large, tumorlike buboes on the skin; they started the size of almonds and grew to the size of eggs. They were painful to the touch and brought on hideous deformities when they grew large. A bubo under the arm would force the arm to lurch uncontrollably out to the side; sited on the neck, it would force the head into a permanently cocked position. The buboes were frequently accompanied by dark blotches, known as God's tokens, an unmistakable sign that the sufferer had been touched by the angel of death. Accompanying these violent deformities, the victim often developed a hacking cough that brought up blood and developed into incessant vomiting. He gave off a disgusting stench, which seemed to leak from every part of his body - his saliva, breath, sweat, and excrement stank overpoweringly - and eventually he began to lose his mind, wandering around screaming and collapsing in pain. — Dan Jones

Once we acquired the power to destroy ourselves, the very notion of human life had been altered; even the air we breathed was contaminated with the stench of death. Sachs was hardly the first person to come up with this idea, but considering what happened to him nine days ago, there's a certain eeriness to the obsession, as if it were a kind of deadly pun, a mixed-up word that took root inside him and proliferated beyond his control. — Paul Auster

For you must know, gentlemen, that when the mariner is dosed, he likes to know that he has been dosed: with fifteen grains or even less of this valuable substance scenting him and the very air about him there can be no doubt of the matter; and such is the nature of the human mind that he experiences a far greater real benefit than the drug itself would provide, were it deprived of its stench. — Patrick O'Brian

It'd taken another half hour under the shower to peel his throbbing eyes open and get rid of the stench of cheap whiskey and even cheaper cigars. — Alexandra Ivy

Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another. — P. J. O'Rourke

Each day we take another step to hell,
Descending through the stench, unhorrified — Charles Baudelaire

I think, honestly, the film industry is eating up comics characters at such a fast pace, and spewing them out as so much unspeakable, stench-y, crap. I mean, I think people are going to get pretty sick of the comics product of superhero, per se. Super-heroism seems to be so visceral for these times. Nobody needs a big clunky guy to throw cars about. You know, we've got drunks in town here that can do that. We don't need that kind of superhero. What we need is a super-sage. We need a genuine group of wise people. We need to become wise. That's the job of tomorrow; becoming wise, and integrated, and understanding. — Melinda Gebbie

Man is made of dirt - I saw him made. I am not made of dirt. Man is a museum of diseases, a home of impurities; he comes to-day and is gone tomorrow; he begins as dirt and departs as stench; I am of the aristocracy of the Imperishables. And man has the Moral Sense. You understand? He has the Moral Sense. That would seem to be difference enough between us, all by itself."
"I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. — Mark Twain

What can you say about hospitals? No matter how upscale they are, the air is always saturated with disinfectant and an underlying stench of chemicals. Most of the patients' doors are closed, but a few of them are open. The beds are mostly occupied by elderly men and women with brown splotchy age marks all over. They're hooked up to tubes and wires and things ... They appear to be sleeping - or lost. It's hard for me to look at them. It's as though all the emptiness inside of all of us - regret about our past and fear about our future - has been physically manifested in these withering bodies. — Nic Sheff

The plant and animal kingdoms (excluding humans) offered some pleasant surprises. Organisms from these realms are much simpler to figure out. Their behaviours are not muddied by personality factors or flawed belief systems. If an insect smells like a fart, you can be sure that the stench has a genetic basis. It is neither trying to make a lofty point, nor is it suffering from an inferiority complex. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

Fred's vacuum-rated armor protected him from the smell of viscera, but it reported it to him as a slight increase in atmospheric methane levels. The stench of death reduced to a data point. — James S.A. Corey

Scott could feel the contents of his stomach flip over and over on themselves. He turned to the side and retched, frothy yellow bile spilled out onto the newspaper covered floor, filling the room with the putrid stench of previously ingested alcohol.
'Look's like someone can't hold their drink,' McBlane said, and Dominic and Shugg laughed.
Scott was still staring at the steam rising from his evacuated stomach contents as he heard the hammer fall. The dull crack of bone splintering under its weight. — R.D. Ronald