Diane Ackerman Quotes

Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.

Smell can conjure up memories for me stronger than any other sense. Especially childhood memories. Perhaps because you were that much shorter and therefore closer to the ground and its smells.

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.

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

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

The radio was on and that was the first time I heard that song, the one I hate. Whenever I hear it all I can think of is that very day riding in the front seat with Lucy leaning against me and the smell of Juicy Fruit making me want to throw up. How can a song do that? Be like a net that catches a whole entire day, even a day whose guts you hate? You hear it and all of a sudden everything comes hanging back in front of you, all tangled up in that music.

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

I used to love 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,' and I can still remember listening to them before I would fall asleep. I can remember the first ten minutes of the book perfectly, but whether I knew the rest of it was slightly more dicey.

I recall feeling an almost delicious terror when one day I found myself alone in the midst of tall June grasses that grew high as my head. But here the secret working of self consciousness is almost too entangled with the things of the past for me to explain it.

Food brings back memories. I had a mom that wasn't a good cook, so I would eat my grandma's food. It was amazing because it brings back a time almost in Technicolor. I see her house, I see her stove; I think about what it felt like when I was sick, and it felt like love.

I love the beach, and I love sunshine.

They say that our sense of smell is one of the strongest triggers of memories. Of course, our sense of smell is integral to our sense of taste, so it is no surprise, then, that in a life full of moving and traveling, food has always been a source of familiar comfort for me.

I think when I listen to old records, it puts me back in the atmosphere of what it felt like to make the record and who was there and what the room looked like. It's more a sensory memory.

As an adult, it's hard for me to remember my mother before her sickness. But if I go back into childhood, I can access that.

Fragrance takes you on a journey of time. You can walk down the street and pass someone and get taken back 20 years. It's very Proustian that way.

Just this morning, out of a large memory for songs, and having been obsessed by them since childhood, suddenly, at the age of 84, I thought of a song I hadn't thought of in over 50 years. It came into my head unbidden.

It's funny what memory does, isn't it? My favorite holiday tradition might not have happened more than once or twice. But because it is such a good memory, so encapsulating of everything I love about the holidays, in my mind it happened every year. Without fail.

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

I was raised in an observant Jewish household, so for me, Hebrew prayers - the sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass windows of a synagogue - bring my father back to me as surely as if he were sitting next to me, my head pressed against his shoulder.

I was put on a surfboard by a cute boyfriend in high school.

I cry whenever I watch an emotional scene that I did, just because it brings me back to that moment. It's like, I remember being there; I remember feeling what I felt. It's really weird, right?

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.

Every moment of my life has a soundtrack, so I never know when some song is going to jump me by surprise and bring the memory alive.

I don't know why, but rain comes into my head the minute I think of my childhood.