Quotes & Sayings About The Smell Of The Rain

A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat', but the driver's hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow got into the driver's hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him - goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did not know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was nothing. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor. He — John Steinbeck

The small tent was empty, but a smell hung in the air. The smell of earth after rain. — James Goss

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity.
The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain. — Pico Iyer

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight-Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck-tonight you could almost taste time. — Ray Bradbury

Even as I regarded those two men, I became aware of the flying beams of the spotlights, to the north-east, painting ephemeral infinity symbols across the pregnant clouds that increasingly commanded the sky, of the distant roller-coaster chain clacking through the ratchet angles of the guideway as cars full of riders climbed an incline toward the next long drop, of the dusty smell of the campground, and of the scent of rain pending. — Dean Koontz

We say no more on the matter and she asks me to help her find a word, an adjective to qualify something that falls on mankind, although not necessarily something of a meteorological nature, like rain, but a word associated with the apocalypse of the human soul and heart, but not in any direct way, more indirectly, like rain in the soul and nature oozing tears, she explains to me. Something like the smell of a birch tree in the rain, just one word. The obstetrician claims that no word could encompass that much, no single word could ever be that big. — Audur Ava Olafsdottir

There's nothing in the world that compares to the feel and smell of brand-new rain. — Colleen Hoover

Cyrus squinted through the rain at the old man, at the truck, at the crackling Golden Lady. What was going on? None of this seemed real. But it was. The rain on his skin. The soggy waffle and drooping napkins. The smell of gunpowder. — N.D. Wilson

I inhale loneliness like it is the sweet smell of virgin earth conquered by fiery rain drops. Within me, I'm a thousand others. — Faraaz Kazi

But that day it was raining, and since they couldn't very well sit on the rooftop in the rain to watch the flotilla parade, they stayed in the little room that led to the roof. It had just one tiny window through which the gray light of day filtered in. They sat on the floor, and Lorenzo's senses were aroused by the sound of the rain falling outside, the musky smell of his own body, and the fragrant scent of Caterina's hair. A single blonde strand wound down her slim neck.

They kissed, taking off their rain-washed summer clothes so that their bodies pressed, naked, against one another. Long, delicate lovemaking. Caresses, kisses, shivers, and sighs of delight.

Lorenzo would have gladly spend the rest of his life preserved in that single moment, as if in amber, abandoning reality to live in the memory of that one single day. — Riccardo Bruni

Silence in the shell of a city, no baby crying, no car honking, no ambulance shrieking, no lovers moaning, no drunks throwing up in the alley, no lights, nothing but wind and rain and snow in its season and rust and a rattling of open doors and carcass smell. It was a possibility like a brain tumor or a scorpion bite. — Anne Roiphe

I love the sound of it," Trina whispers, as if speaking too loudly might interrupt the drumming patter of the rain outside. "It makes me want to sleep. Snuggle my head right up in your armpit and snore for three days."
"My armpit?" Mark repeats. "Good thing we all showered up in the storm this morning. My pits smell like roses. Go ahead and get comfy. — James Dashner

Do you, Damon Chroi, sovereign of the Goblin Kingdom, take this woman, Diana Piper, to be your queen and wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, in times of angry gods and rogue goblins, in true name-induced death and in health, because she resurrected you - you lucky bastard - to love and to cherish even when she's more powerful than you and kicking your ass at everything you do, from this day forward until she can no longer stand the smell of rain? - Roman D'Angelo — Heather Killough-Walden

Outside, I could smell the Zebra. Even if for some reason I stopped feeling cold or hot or rain or sun, I bet I could close my eyes and still tell which season I was in just by the smell of the trees and dirt there. Spring was sweet mud and flowers. Fall has a kind of moldy edge to it, and winter was all dust and bark. As for summer, the Zebra carried a mossy, thick aroma full of baking leaves and oozing sap, which I guessed was its growing smell. — Adina Rishe Gewirtz

Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point. — Wallace Stevens

Winds shake the leaves and for a moment I smell smoke. I concentrate on the scent, but it vanishes into the aroma of rain and tree bark, the way one life can collapse into another and different people can stir within the same body, like bats thrashing inside a secret hollow. — Laura Van Den Berg

A BIRTHDAY
Something continues and I don't know what to call it
though the language is full of suggestions
in the way of language
but they are all anonymous
and it's almost your birthday music next to my bones
these nights we hear the horses running in the rain
it stops and the moon comes out and we are still here
the leaks in the roof go on dripping after the rain has passed
smell of ginger flowers slips through the dark house
down near the sea the slow heart of the beacon flashes
the long way to you is still tied to me but it brought me to you
I keep wanting to give you what is already yours
it is the morning of the mornings together
breath of summer oh my found one
the sleep in the same current and each waking to you
when I open my eyes you are what I wanted to see. — W.S. Merwin

Time slows when we put all of our senses into a moment. When we notice the lighting, the way their clothes hang on their body, the smell of the rain, the sounds of the birds outside. Time slows when we taste our food on all sides of our tongues. — Shawn Fink

YOU! You're boring! You're not even good enough for a good insult! You're in the one place Where magic is always real! Part the seas if you want! Rain down ink and blood! Transform! Fly! You're not allowed to spend the rest of your life panicking! You've got to give something back if you want to get out of here!"
What? What?? What do I give?"
You've got stories in there, I know, I can smell 'em
"
Stoppit, stoppit! I don't! I can't tell a story to save my life!"
Funny you should put it that way. — Carla Speed McNeil

Memory is an artist, an impressionist. She adds colour, sound, smell and emotion to events at her whim. She adds, subtracts and embellishes until the event she started documenting is quite unrecognisable to the others who also experienced it, but at the same time, is more truthful to the owner of the memory. There is no reality. There are only impres- sions of past events, made by a million selves, all interacting with each other, vying for superiority. Reality doesn't exist, perhaps in the end, that's my only truth. — Nigel Jay Cooper

As the shabby section of the audience rose to its feet, waving its hats and food-wrappers, a rich, stale smell wafted through the auditorium. It had something of the fog on the boulevard outside, where the pavements were sticky with rain, but also something more intimate : it suggested old stew and course tobacco, the coat racks and bookshelves of a pawnshop, and damp straw mattresses impregnated with urine and patchouli. It was - as though the set designer had intended some ironical epilogue - the smell of the real Latin Quarter. — Graham Robb

He was the smell of winter rain and the sound of his predator's heartbeat — L.J.Smith

Come clean with a child heart
Laugh as peaches in the summer wind
Let rain on a house roof be a song
Let the writing on your face
be a smell of apple orchards on late June. — Carl Sandburg

I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy. — Teju Cole

At Ghent the wind rose.
There was a smell of rain and a heavy drag
Of wind in the hedges but not as the wind blows
Over fresh water when the waves lag
Foaming and the willows huddle and it will rain ... — Archibald MacLeish

You don't have to go to church and sit in a pew to find faith. Look into the eyes of a newborn baby or watch a sunset. Listen to children laughing. Like when a dog licks your palm or when you can smell the rain steaming the asphalt on a hot summer day. There is God ... there is love, and there is evidence of your faith. Live, breathe, love ... the rest will come easily. — Greever Williams

I closed my mouth and looked across the water. Inches away, Denna did the same. I could feel the heat of her. She smelled like road dust, and honey, and the smell the air holds seconds before a heavy summer rain. — Patrick Rothfuss

Life is full of joy and beauty. Look around and notice it. Notice the little butterfly, a little baby with a smile, and the white rose in the garden. Notice a drop of dew on a green leaf in the morning sun. Touch the wind, smell the rain, and feel the joy. Live your life with beauty and joy. — Debasish Mridha

The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of the pond, the smell of the wind itself cleansed by a midday rain, or scented with pinon pine. The air is precious to the red man, for all things are the same breath - the animals, the trees, the man. — Chief Seattle

But that's the thing, how you feel about the place that's home. About its sky, its air, its smell, the color of the light, the way the rain falls (or doesn't), whether it hot or cold. — Laura McBride

The smell of rain is rich with life. — Estela Portillo Trambley

The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass, and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the grey-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass? Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle. — Anonymous

You cannot divide a child's heart in two" she had observed to Mma Makutsi, "and yet that is what some people wish to do. A child has only one heart."
"And the rest of us?" Mma Makutsi had asked. "Do we not have one heart too?"
Mma Ramotswe nodded. "Yes, we have only one heart, but as you grow older you heart grows bigger. A child loves only one or two things; we love so many things."
"Such as?"
Mma Ramotswe smiled. "Botswana. Rain. Cattle. Friends. Our children. Our late relatives. The smell of woodsmoke in the morning. Red bush tea ... — Alexander McCall Smith

The world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can
the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker. — Frederick Buechner

He saw the black water and the declining sun and the swan dipping down, its white wings flashing, and slowing and slowing till silver ripples carried it home. It was a scene which seemed the heart of this land. The lowing sun and the one star waking, white wings on a black water, and the smell of rain, and the long lane fading where a voice comes in the falling night.
Ireland, said Scrotes.
Yes, this is Ireland.
— Jamie O'Neill

That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again. — Marcel Proust

I'm pulled, pushed and then I find my back against a wall. Eagan's taut frame is bent toward mine, and my body is arched toward his. We create a peculiar sculpture of opposite forces. He cups my face in his palms and makes me look up at him. His lips are so close to mine, that I feel the whisper of his breath against my mouth; I smell mint and a hint of beer. I desire a kiss so desperately, my body is humming with longing. I curl my fingers around his wrists.
"I hate fighting with you," he admits huskily.
"I know. Me too."
"I need to hold you."
I nod and let him fold his arms around me. I bury my face against his chest and utter soft sounds of contentment as his warmth leaks into my skin.
I glance at our shadows painted on the gravel by darkness and streetlights; we're not opposite forces any longer, we're one single being.

("A Veil of Glass and Rain") — Petra F. Bagnardi

On the box he had a stack of magazines. Without seeing the covers, I knew they were pornography. Precious finds in the days before the internet. The combination of glossy pages and sperm is the smell of boyhood for men my age. You used to find them hidden in the bushes. I guess kids stole them from the shops and then were too scared to take them home. Sometimes they'd be damaged by rain or fire (masturbation and setting fire to things: the two great impulses of boyhood), the paper as brittle as an old man's skin. Meanwhile, as I found out years later, girls were reading 'romance novels' in the comfort of their bedrooms. Men, have you ever read those things? Damn. — James Hutchings

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

If we didn't have bodies, we couldn't feel the sun on our faces or smell the earthy, mushroom-y rich smell of the ground right after the rain. If we didn't have bodies, we couldn't wrap our arms around the people we love or taste a perfect tomato right at the height of summer. I'm so thankful to live in this physical, messy, blood-and-guts world. I don't want to live in a world that's all dry ideas and theorems. Food is one of the ways we acknowledge our humanity, our appetites, our need for nourishment. And so it may seem trivial or peripheral to some people, but to me, when I'm telling a story, the part about what we ate really does matter. — Shauna Niequist

I crumple onto the lounger and cry again even though I didn't think I had any tears left. And then Dante is next to me, with his wet arms around me and he's whispering in my ear.
And the huskiness of his voice.
The smell of his wet skin.
The beating of his heart against my hand.
All of it.
I don't want to be without him.
Maybe he's right. Maybe love is all that matters. And we can get through our differences. We can get through anything.
And then he's kissing me.
And I'm letting him.
And I'm kissing him back.
Because I love him and he loves me and Elena Kontou doesn't matter.
Dante's hands are all over me, warm and strong and I lean into him, into his warmth, his strength. It's still raining, but we are kissing in the rain and it's sexy as hell. In fact, I think I'll kiss in the rain forever. For the rest of my life. Because it's just that sexy. — Courtney Cole

Why does the rain make us feel so romantic and strange? Maybe it's the fact that we are unnatural spectators of it, from inside our homes, and it is a reminder that we have the power to live our whole lives like this, if we choose. It's not the smell of fertile ground kicked up by raindrops, or the slick leaves, or the way we must amplify our voices to be heard over this larger presence. It's the power of the rooftop that makes us want to fuck under it. — Amelia Gray

I don't know what that means. To truly live."
"To find work that you love, and work harder than other men. To learn the languages of the earth, and love the sounds of the words and the things they describe. To love food and music and drink. Fully love them. To love weather, and storms, and the smell of rain. To love heat. To love cold. To love sleep and dreams. To love the newness of each day. — Pete Hamill

Sometimes when I'm with you, I remember things I lost when I was your age. Like I remember the sound of the rain and the smell of the wind. — Haruki Murakami

I can't say what made me fall in love with Vietnam - that a woman's voice can drug you; that everything is so intense. The colors, the taste, even the rain. Nothing like the filthy rain in London. They say whatever you're looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived. The smell: that's the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul. And the heat. Your shirt is straightaway a rag. You can hardly remember your name, or what you came to escape from. But at night, there's a breeze. The river is beautiful. You could be forgiven for thinking there was no war; that the gunshots were fireworks; that only pleasure matters. A pipe of opium, or the touch of a girl who might tell you she loves you. And then, something happens, as you knew it would. And nothing can ever be the same again. — Graham Greene

Like sheep which, having been driven to a pasture, can now spread out at their leisure, the clouds began to drift. Afternoon sunlight sliced through into the still waters. The boomerang hung in the sky, and the boy thought he would have to find a new word for the way the colours glowed.
In the meantime, he looked down at the water and tried out the word he'd been taught by his grandfather, who'd been taught it by his grandfather, and which had been kept for thousands of years for when it would been needed.
It meant the smell after rain.
It had, he thought, been well worth waiting for. — Terry Pratchett

The fragrance of rain mixes with the smell of old books. It is heavenly - that combination of threat and safety. — Trudy Wallis

I keep going back as if I'm looking for something I have lost. Back to the motherland, sisterland, fatherland. Back to the beacon, the breast, the smell and taste of the breeze, and the singing of the rain. — Heather Nova

A SOFT fall rain slips down through the trees and the smell of ocean is so strong that it can almost be licked off the air. — Sebastian Junger

A picture is not going to be like a stone that has been subjected to the rain and the heat and the cold and the dirt and the smell of Jerusalem. This stone is Jerusalem. It is. — Refaat Alareer

What they would see first would be a darkening of the sky in the east - a change from empty blue to a grey-white that would gradually shade into a heavy, inky purple. And then there would be a wind - the wind that preceded a storm and carried the smell of rain on its breath. — Alexander McCall Smith

Emily's world fascinates and disturbs: in it you can touch thick Yorkshire speech, and moorland rain slants across your mind with a smell of mossy limestone and yet you are not at home, you might almost be in Gondal or Angria except the towers and the dungeons are of the spirit, the dungeons especially; and sometimes when Emily reads out in her low, almost guttural voice Charlotte wants to run but can't think why or where she would run to. — Jude Morgan

And with it would come that wonderful, unmistakable smell of rain, that smell of dust and water meeting that lingered for a few seconds in the nostrils and then was gone, and would be missed, sometimes for months, before the next time that it caught you and made you stop and say to the person with you, any person: That is the smell of rain, there, right now. — Alexander McCall Smith

We're as common as rain. And she was right: to each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family, even exaggerations make perfect sense; they are always logical exaggerations, nothing more. — John Irving

The taste of good coffee, so deep and complex that it was almost a crime to describe it by a single name. The sound of rain falling on the pavement, the smell of petrichor and moistened loam. The color of a single raven's feather in the sunlight, rainbows caught in ebony - ========== — Anonymous

A strange thing happened to me as I walked away from Jane's house
I was finally thinking clearly. I could see what Charlotte meant. Jane knew how to fix people. Now that I'd talked through some of my issues, I'd blown out the dust and garbage out of my brain and I could think for once. I could smell the rain, heavy with iron. The cold woke me, but it didn't sting. My breath puffed out in front of me in a great white plume, and I laughed. It was like I was breathing ghosts. I wasn't in the land of long highways and big box stores and humid, endless summers. I was in London, a city of stone and rain and magic. I understood, for instance, why they liked red so much. The red buses, telephone booths, and postboxes were a violent shock against the grays of the sky and stone. Red was blood and beating hearts.
And I was strong. — Maureen Johnson

The magic of purpose and of love in its purest form. Not televison love, with its glare and hollow and sequined glint; not sex and allure, all high shoes and high drama, everything both too small and in too much excess, but just love. Love like rain, like the smell of a tangerine, like a surprise found in your pocket. — Deb Caletti

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop. — Abel Meeropol

I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport.
We reached Paris just as the light was fading. It had been a soft, gray March day, with the smell of spring in the air. The wet tarmac glistened underfoot; over the airfield the sky looked very high, rinsed by the afternoon's rain to a pale clear blue. Little trails of soft cloud drifted in the wet wind, and a late sunbeam touched them with a fleeting underglow. Away beyond the airport buildings the telegraph wires swooped gleaming above the road where passing vehicles showed lights already. — Mary Stewart

We get given our faces, thinks Audie, but we inherit our lives, our happiness and our unhappiness. Some get a lot, some get a little. Some savor every morsel and suck the marrow out of every bone. We take pleasure in the sound of rain, the smell of cut grass, the smiles of strangers, the feeling of dawn on a hot day. We learn things and realize we can never know more than we don't know. We catch love like a cold and cling to it like wreckage in a storm. — Michael Robotham

The morning was fresh from the rain. The smell of the tide pools was strong. Sweet odors came from the wild grasses in the ravines and from the sand plants on the dunes. I sang as I went down the trail to the beach and along the beach to the sandspit. I felt that the day was an omen of good fortune. It was a good day to begin my new home. — Scott O'Dell

When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of "jazz" as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity. — David Sedaris

The sound of thunder, the smell of rain. The earth giving birth to another season. Nature's labor pains ... beautiful. — Carol Morgan

Thanks to the long days of rain, the blades of grass glowed with a deep-green luster, and they gave off the smell of wildness unique to things that sink their roots into the earth. — Haruki Murakami

Even as a boy Jack had loved the smell of the ground softening in the thaw and coming back to life. Not this spring. A damp, moldy dreariness, something like loneliness, had settled over the homestead. At first Jack did not know its source. Maybe it was only his own mood. Perhaps it was the spring weather, with overcast skies and freezing rain that soaked through the cabin walls. Mabel, too, seemed beset by a morose restlessness. — Eowyn Ivey

The present is the transition point between the past and future and flows like a river moving towards the ocean of one's life. One who lives in the present is neither burdened by the weight of the past nor troubled by foreseen events in the future. One who lives in the present is open to all experiences --the gentle sound of the wind rustling in the leaves, the blazing sight of the setting sun, the light touch of a spring rain, the fresh smell of green grass, the salty taste of ocean spray. The present is the past and future rolled into one. The present is here. The present is now. — Francis Fesmire

And we are giddy, because dawn is here, we're at the center of the world and we're at the center of our own universe, and spring is here, and the air smells wet and clean. God bless Manhattan, you know, because it must be six in the morning on a Sunday yet trash collection trucks are teeming down the street and Times Square workers in their bright-orange uniforms are cleaning up the night's excesses and not even the smell of fresh spring rain can completely wash away Eau de Times Square Urine/Trash/Vomit, but somehow this here, this now, it feels perfect. — Rachel Cohn

I make a point to appreciate all the little things in my life. I go out and smell the air after a good, hard rain. I re-read passages from my favorite books. I hold the little treasures that somebody special gave me. These small actions help remind me that there are so many great, glorious pieces of good in the world. — Dolly Parton

Life is full of beauty. Notice it. Notice the bumble bee, the small child, and the smiling faces. Smell the rain, and feel the wind. Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams. — Ashley Smith

She could smell the storm on him, like the lightning had followed him home, like he was made of the same dense rain clouds. — Leigh Bardugo

At 6:15 she was standing on her front porch watering gardenias and watching another line of thunderstorms split and go around her. The same thing happened almost every day. Some days they came so close all she could smell was the rain. The wind whipped up dust from the fields until it drove like buckshot into the shuddering mesquites, and Clara Nell started to pray. 'Jesus,' she whispered. 'Jesus, Jesus....' But the only thing that came out of the sky was her topsoil. Every day the wind took a little more, and it hadn't rained in almost a year. — Andrew Geyer

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows. — Niall Williams

So I went back in time and told her how I liked the smell of soil after the rain. It has a special place in my heart. It reminds me of my childhood days. Days spent in happiness and tranquility. — Avijeet Das

There is only a black fence
and a wide field and a barn of Wyeth red.
The smell of anger chokes the air.
Ravens of September rain descend.
Some say a mad mad hermit man lived here
talking to himself and the woodchuck.
But he's gone. No reason. No sense.
He just wandered off one day,
past the onions, past the fence.
Forget the letters. Forget love.
Troy is nothing more than
a black finger of charcoal
frozen in lake ice.
And near where the owl watches
and the old bear dreams,
the parapet of memory burns to the ground
taking heaven with it. — Mark Z. Danielewski

You whining coward of a vampire who prowls the night killing alley cats and rats and staring for hours at candles as if they were people and standing in the rain like a zombie until your clothes are drenched and you smell like old wardrobe trunks in attics and have the look of a baffled idiot at the zoo. — Anne Rice

I find myself comparing the feel and smell of brand-new rain to his kiss. His kiss is much, much better. — Colleen Hoover

was a life that wore you out, used up every ounce of your energy, and kept you profoundly, unquestionably happy. In the literal sense of the word, it stupefied you. The long days in the fields, the coarse food and insufficient sleep, the smell of hops and wood smoke, lulled you into an almost beastlike heaviness. Your wits seemed to thicken, just as your skin did, in the rain and sunshine and perpetual fresh air. — George Orwell

When you sit in America you miss the open plains and you miss the sound of rain and the smell of rain and the smell of the veld. If you're African it's different and I don't think one will ever become an American or British. It doesn't matter where you move, you will always be a South African, — Zola Budd

You reach a certain age when reality grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shouts in your face:"Hey, look, this is what life is." And you have to open your eyes and look at it, listen to it, smell it: people who don't like you, things you don't want to do, things that hurt, things that scare you, questions without answers, feelings you don't understand, feelings you don't want but have no control over.
Reality.
When you gradually come to realise that all that stuff in books, films, television, magazines, newspapers, comics - it's all rubbish. It's got nothing to do with anything. It's all made up. It doesn't happen like that. It's not real. It means nothing. Reality is what you see when you look out of the window of a bus: dour faces, sad and temporary lives, millions of cars, metal, bricks, glass, rain, cruel laughter, ugliness, dirt, bad teeth, crippled pigeons, little kids in pushchairs who've already forgotten how to smile ... — Kevin Brooks

He smelled the odor of the pine boughs under him, the piney smell of the crushed needles and the sharper odor of the resinous sap from the cut limbs ... This is the smell I love. This and fresh-cut clover, the crushed sage as you ride after cattle, wood-smoke and the burning leaves of autumn. That must be the odor of nostalgia, the smell of the smoke from the piles of raked leaves burning in the streets in the fall in Missoula. Which would you rather smell? Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets? Smoked leather? The odor of the ground in the spring after rain? The smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galicia? Or the wind from the land as you come in toward Cuba in the dark? That was the odor of cactus flowers, mimosa and the sea-grape shrubs. Or would you rather smell frying bacon in the morning when you are hungry? Or coffee in the morning? Or a Jonathan apple as you bit into it? Or a cider mill in the grinding, or bread fresh from the oven? — Ernest Hemingway,

He leaned over to kiss the top of my head, and then groaned. I looked at him, puzzled.
"You smell so good in the rain," he explained.
"In a good way, or in a bad way?" I asked cautiously.
He sighed. "Both, always both. — Stephenie Meyer

Our minds, as well as our bodies, have need of the out-of-doors. Our spirits, too, need simple things, elemental things, the sun and the wind and the rain, moonlight and starlight, sunrise and mist and mossy forest trails, the perfumes of dawn and the smell of fresh-turned earth and the ancient music of wind among the trees. — Edwin Way Teale

I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves. — Haruki Murakami

I like one hair, tuna fish, the smell of rain and things that are pink. I hate pimples, baked potatoes, when my mother's mad, and religious holidays. — Judy Blume

The old women in black at early Mass in winter
are a problem for him. He could tell by their eyes
they have seen Christ. They make the kernel
of his being and the clarity around it
seem meager, as though he needs girders
to hold up his unusable soul. But he chooses
against the Lord. He will not abandon his life.
Not his childhood, not the ninety-two bridges
across the two rivers of his youth. Nor the mills
along the banks where he became a young man
as he worked. The mills are eaten away, and eaten
again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them
even though they are gone, to measure against.
The silver is worn down to the brass underneath
and is the better for it. He will gauge
by the smell of concrete sidewalks after night rain.
He is like an old ferry dragged on to the shore,
a home in its smashed grandeur, with the giant beams
and joists. Like a wooden ocean out of control.
A beached heart. A cauldron of cooling melt. — Jack Gilbert

Maybe that's a haiku, maybe not, it might be a little too complicated," said Japhy. "A real haiku's gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes 'The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.' By Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that's been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles."

(The Dharma Bums, Chap. 8) — Jack Kerouac

I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. — Niall Williams

In her mind she could remember about six different tunes from the pieces of his [Mozart's] she had heard. A few of them were kind of quick and tinkling, and another was like that smell in springtime after a rain. But they all made her somehow sad and excited at the same time.
She hummed one of the tunes, and after a while in the hot, empty house by herself she felt the tears come in her eyes. — Carson McCullers

Tosh throws up her hands. 'Tell me what you want!'
What I want...
To smell the desert after rain? To awake each morning beneath a soft Cheyenne blanket, skin still heavy with his scent? To rip out the flawed cog inside of me that brought it all to a screeching halt, then wind back through the years and do everything all over again. Perhaps that is what I want. A different ending. — Allyson Stack

That's how it is, Rocamadour: in Paris we're like fungus, we grow on the railings of staircases, in dark rooms with greasy smells, where people make love all the time and then fry some eggs and put on Vivaldi records, light cigarettes ... and outside there are all sorts of things, the windows open onto the air and it all begins with a sparrow or a gutter, it rains a lot here, rocamadour, much more than in the country, and things get rusty ... we don't have many clothes, we get along with so few, a good overcoat, some shoes to keep the rain out, we're very dirty, everybody is dirty and good-looking in Paris, Rocamadour, the beds smell of night and deep sleep, dust and books underneath. — Julio Cortazar

No sane person resists the smell of the soil when sprinkled with water,
Especially the smell of the intercourse between earth and rain. — Nomthandazo Tsembeni

Mandy loved the smell of a sunny day after a night of rain. The sun hit the orange puddles, the overgrown, soft, green grass on her lawn, and it beamed down through the orange steel mill smog, sending otherworldly, bizarre shadows across the concrete sidewalk. — Rebecca McNutt

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

Living Memory
I carry you with me into the world,
into the smell of rain
& the words that dance between people
& for me, it will always be this way,
walking in the light,
remembering being alive together — Brian Andreas