Diane Ackerman 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.

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.

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.

My mom would have different fragrances for different times of the year. They were a part of her identity. I don't remember the specific ones she used, but I remember the bottles.

Smelling a crayon takes you right back to childhood. When I need to go back in time, I put it under my nose and take another hit.

The smells are very strong on 'Game of Thrones': the incense, the fire, the heat of all the burns. The smell of Lancel's Faith Militant cloth is very thick in my nostrils right now. And I think the warmth of it all: the hard work ethics, the ambiance, the temperature of the set. There are so many sensory memories of it, which will never leave me.

Smell brings to mind... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.

The smells of Christmas are the smells of childhood [p. 53]

When you smell our candles burning, what does it make you think of, my child?" Winterfell, she might have said. I smell snow and smoke and pine needles. I smell the stables. I smell Hodor laughing, and Jon and Robb battling in the yard, and Sansa singing about some stupid lady fair. I smell the crypts where the stone kings sit. I smell hot bread baking. I smell the godswood. I smell my wolf. I smell her fur, almost as if she were still beside me. "I don't smell anything," she said.

Of the women in my childhood, I retain above all the memory of their perfumes, perfumes that lingered - filling the lift with fragrance long after they had gone.

That was the summer of 1963, when everybody called me ‘Baby,’ and it didn't occur to me to mind.

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.

Remember with your heart. Go back, go back and go back. The skies of this world were always meant to have dragons. When they are not here, humans miss them. Some never think of them, of course. But some children, from the time they are small, they look up at the blue summer sky and watch for something that never comes. Because they know. Something that was supposed to be there faded and vanished. Something that we must bring back, you and I.

I remember specific times and people in my life so much more clearly if I smell something that brings me back to them.

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was charged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind- loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies in the perfumed heat of summer night.

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

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.

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.

Nothing awakens reminiscence like an aroma.

Kerosene," he said, because the silence had lengthened, "is nothing but perfume to me.

Scent is the strongest tie to memory.

How do you know, Dan? You were so young when they died. Do you really remember them?" "Not in my mind," Dan replied, gazing at the passing scenery. "But everyplace else.