Michael Ondaatje Quotes

We humans will never know how meadows or mountains smell, but deer and horses and pigs do. Bando sniffs deeply and shakes his head. We were left out when it comes to smelling things, he says. I would love to be able to smell a mountain and follow my nose to it.

I knew I was in England by the smell.

With a sudden sharp hot stink of fox, It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.

If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology.

When I got inside, I just sort of stood there. There's nothing stranger than the smell of someone else's house. The scent goes right to your stomach. Mary's house smelled like lemon furniture polish and oatmeal cookies and logs in a fireplace. For some reason it made me want to curl up in the fetal position. I could have slept right there on their kitchen table.

I like chocolate. I don’t eat it, but I like the smell of it. People can drink with their eyes; I can eat with my nose. I would love to have a perfume based on chocolate.

Odors have an altogether peculiar force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight or the hearing.

You're right. Everyone in this room with a pulse is starting to smell really good. Okay. Back in the box, better safe than sorry.

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

To smell, though well, is to stink.

What's that smell?" I froze. What? Did I really smell so distasteful he had only to lean in my direction to catch a putrid whiff of me? I stayed the urge to break his freaking nose for pointing out my stinkiness. He sniffed again. "I can't place it." "How bad is it?" I asked, my cheeks heating. "It's good. Some kind of flower." My first thought: Hurray! I don't stink. My second: Ohmygod!

Stevie Wonder always smells so good... I'm like a DEA dog, I can smell people a block away!

The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.

Smell that? You smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.

He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.

Perfume: any smell that is used to drown a worse one.

I know,I can smell it, too.

Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.

Smells are the fallen angels of the senses.

If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.

A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.

Eighty percent of love is smell.

Hearing is the motion of molecules; sound is a wave in the atmosphere; solidity is the characteristic of spatial juxtaposition of atoms; smell is something given off by a body, rather than something belonging to a body.

I fell asleep to the scent of my wolf. Pine needles, cold rain, earthy perfume, coarse bristles on my face.