George Gissing Quotes

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

A computer does not smell ... if a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better… And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

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

For a moment he could have sworn he smelled violets, which was very peculiar, since he had no idea what violets smelled like, except somehow he knew they smelled just like Lady Emma.

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.

Patchouli has always been a part of my fragrance, like a line through my life.

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

If you're walking down the street and you smell a scent, it can take you right back to a memorable time in your life, whether it's a moment with an ex-girlfriend or a childhood event.

Scents evoke very, very powerful memories, whether it's the scent of someone that you know and someone that you love, or if it's a meal that your mother made.

I read 'Love in the Time of Cholera' when I was 19, and I still think about the characters.

Taking walks sometimes bring back memories of my childhood because a smell might trigger a memory.

Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?

I like that you can open up any one of my books anywhere and immediately be lost. I just love them so much.

Smell remembers and tells the future. ... Smell is home or loneliness. Confidence or betrayal. Smell remembers.

From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.

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

Words are alive--when I've found a story that I love, I read it again and again, like playing a favorite song over and over. Reading isn't passive--I enter the story with the characters, breathe their air, feel their frustrations, scream at them to stop when they're about to do something stupid, cry with them, laugh with them. Reading for me, is spending time with a friend. A book is a friend. You can never have too many.

Because each book has its own special perfume.

I feel lucky that I read so many books as a kid because I know that no matter how much I appreciate a book now, and I can love a book very much, it's never going to be that childhood passion for a book. There's some element, something special about the way they're reading books and experiencing books that's finite.

I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.

But it was smell that carried memory.

When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect; the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face,--compare notes and chat the hour away.

Books never pall on me. They discourse with us, they take counsel with us, and are united to us by a certain living chatty familiarity. And not only does each book inspire the sense that it belongs to its readers, but it also suggests the name of others, and one begets the desire of the other.