Sophie Dahl Quotes

Music and smells are the most memory-recall, nostalgia-inducing things.

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

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

There is nothing like an odor to stir memories.

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.

Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.

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.

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.

I like books that aren't just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.

I think listening to music from your youth is as powerful as a scent passed beneath your nose.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

[M]emory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

Nothing awakens reminiscence like an aroma.

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

History could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one's eyelids.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

Food is so heavily connected to memory.

I have a painter's memory. I can remember things from my childhood which were so powerfully imprinted on me, the whole scene comes back.

I exist only in the past.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory. I like the atmospheres that result if episodes are narrated through the haze of memory.

You think about some of the most memorable meals you've ever had; the food will be good but it will often be about locating a mental memory and taste is inexorably linked to all the other senses and memory, so ultimately it is all about taste.