Julio Cortazar Quotes

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.

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

When I write about things, it's a lot to do with sense memory. How things smell and taste can bring incredible memories flooding back and transport you in an instant to another time and place.

The sense of smell is the hair-trigger of memory.

Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.

Smells, like music, hold memories. She breathed deep, and bottled it up for posterity.

In memory, you can access something from the past, anything that you've experienced that you remember - it's there. Now, you might have a memento of it in a photograph or in a film or a building or some clothes that you wore. There might be something that connects you to this memory. But all of us are just all caught in this time, whatever that is.

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory

The past is more than a memory.

An actor definitely has to be in the past a well as the present; an actor must react to past experiences every minute, every second.

If you ask me, music is the language of memory

I've learned that memories can have a physical, almost living presence.

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

Old paper, which my mom used to say was the smell of time itself.

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

Certain scents can evoke so much feeling, nostalgia, and trigger beautiful memories.

It smelled like aging wood and creosote, plastic book covers, and old paper. Old paper, which my mom used to say was the smell of time itself.

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.

It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.

Nothing awakens reminiscence like an aroma.

[Memory] visits when it is hungry, not when you are.

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?" "They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now." But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods,… She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

Scent is the strongest tie to memory.