“
This book, when I am dead, will be
A little faint perfume of me.
People who knew me well will say,
She really used to think that way.
”
”
Edna St. Vincent Millay (Collected Poems)
“
Ithaka
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
”
”
Constantinos P. Cavafy (C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems)
“
Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives.
To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates.
'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic.
They've served their purpose.
Nature is unsentimental.
Death is built in.
”
”
Carl Sagan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Earth Before Humans by ANN DRUYAN' 'CARL SAGAN (1992-05-03))
“
He was there alone with himself, collected, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations, and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe.
”
”
Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
“
To want is to wait, as I do in the place I know,
my breathing loud and single as the room,
its smell of spider dust and old perfume.
”
”
Jeet Thayil (Collected Poems)
“
The works of Jesus and Mary can also be called wonderful flowers; but their perfume and beauty can only be appreciated by those who study them carefully—and who open them and drink in their scent by diligent and sincere meditation.
”
”
Louis de Montfort (The Saint Louis de Montfort Collection [7 Books])
“
Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.
”
”
Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)
“
Cherishables,” I agreed. “Lovely little finds that have tiny value but lots of heart. Tea tins, picture frames, old perfume bottles. Half the fun is finding them, and the other half imagining where they came from.
”
”
Rebecca Raisin (The Little Antique Shop under the Eiffel Tower (The Little Paris Collection, #2))
“
The Devil's Rose
You would never take a rose from a beast.
If his callous hand were to hold out a scarlet flower, his grip unaffected by pricking thorns, you would shrink from the gift and refuse it. I know that is what you would do.
But the cunning beast will have his beauty.
He hunts not in hopeless pursuit, for fear would have you sprint all the day long. Thus, he turns toward the shadows and clutches the rosebud, crunching and twisting until every delicate petal is detached. One falls not far from your feet, and you notice the red spot in the snow.
The color sparkles in the sunlight, catching your curious eye. No beast stands in sight; there is nothing to fear, so you dare retrieve the lone petal. The touch of temptation is velvet against your thumb. It carries a scent you bring to your nose, and both eyes close to float on a cloud of perfume.
As your lashes lift, another scarlet drop stains the snow at a near distance. A glance around perceives no danger, and so your footprints scar the snowflakes to retrieve another rosy leaflet as soft and sweet as the first. Your eyes shine with flecks of golden greed at the discovery of more discarded petals, and you blame the wind for scattering them mere footprints apart. All you want is a few, so you step and snatch, step and snatch, step and snatch.
Soon, there is enough velvet to rub against your cheek like a silken kerchief. Your collection of one-plus-one-more reeks of floral essence.
Distracted, you jump at the sight of the beast in your path. He stands before his lair, grinning without love. His callous hands grip at thorns on a single naked stem, and you look down at your own hands that now cup his rose. But how can it be? You would never take a rose from a beast. You would shrink from the gift and refuse it. He knows that is what you would do.
”
”
Richelle E. Goodrich (Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year)
“
the sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realized its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.
”
”
Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)
“
...she was fantasizing about riding a horse through a meadow...The perfume of wildflowers wafted to her nose as the sun warmed her face.
”
”
Carla Reighard (Elle's Magical Shoes (The Magical Things Collection Book 1))
“
Even the perfume-free fragrance in your delightful bubble bath you were taking was from one of my first collections, Eau de Water
”
”
J.S. Mason (A Dragon, A Pig, and a Rabbi Walk into a Bar...and other Rambunctious Bites)
“
She had a smooth, low voice and a naughty, shocking sense of humour. Laughter followed in her wake; she collected admirers, both male and female, simply walking across the lobby. She had a certain knack for including everyone in her own private jokes, bending in conspiratorially to say something wickedly off-colour to one of the old stone-faced dowagers waiting for a cab. The next moment, they’d both be giggling uncontrollably
”
”
Kathleen Tessaro (The Perfume Collector)
“
I turn my head a little. The radio's caroling "Tonight," velvety smooth and young and filled with plaintive desire. Maria's song from West Side Story. I remember one beautiful night long ago at the Winter Garden, with a beautiful someone beside me. I tilt my nose and breathe in, and I can still smell her perfume, the ghost of her perfume from long ago. But where is she now, where did she go, and what did I do with her?
Our paths ran along so close together they were almost like one, the one they were eventually going to be. Thin fear came along, fear entered into it somehow, and split them wide apart.
Fear bred anxiety to justify. Anxiety to justify bred anger. The phone calls that wouldn't be answered, the door rings that wouldn't be opened. Anger bred sudden calamity.
Now there aren't two paths anymore; there's only one, only mine. Running downhill into the ground, running downhill into its doom.
("New York Blues")
”
”
Cornell Woolrich (Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich (Otto Penzler Book))
“
A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
”
”
Maya Angelou (A Brave and Startling Truth)
“
Living away from the present, in an artificial paradise, Bertha was almost completely happy. She found indifference to the whole world a trusty armour: life was easy without love or hate, hope or despair, without ambition, desire of change, or tumultuous passion. So bloom the flowers; unconscious, uncaring, the bud bursts from the enclosing leaf, and opens to the sunshine, squanders its perfume to the breeze and there is none to see its beauty—and then it dies.
”
”
W. Somerset Maugham (The W. Somerset Maugham Collection)
“
Here you will meet singular side-whiskers, tucked with extraordinary and amazing art under the necktie, velvety whiskers, satiny whiskers, black as sable or coal, but, alas, belonging only to the foreign office. Providence has denied black side-whiskers to those serving in other departments; they, however great the unpleasantness, must wear red ones. Here you will meet wondrous mustaches, which no pen or brush is able to portray; mustaches to which the better part of a lifetime is devoted––object of long vigils by day and by night; mustaches on which exquisite perfumes and scents have been poured, and which have been anointed with all the most rare and precious sorts of pomades, mustaches which are wrapped overnight in fine vellum, mustaches which are subject to the most touching affection of their possessors and are the envy of passers-by. A thousand kinds of hats, dresses, shawls––gay-colored, ethereal, for which their owners' affection sometimes lasts a whole two days––will bedazzle anyone on Nevsky Prospect.
”
”
Nikolai Gogol (The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol)
“
Gacela of Unexpected Love"
No one understood the perfume
of the shadow magnolia of your belly.
No one knew you crushed completely
a humming-bird of love between your teeth.
There slept a thousand little persian horses
in the moonlight plaza of your forehead,
while, for four nights, I embraced there
your waist, the enemy of snowfall.
Between the plaster and the jasmines,
your gaze was a pale branch, seeding.
I tried to give you, in my breastbone,
the ivory letters that say ever.
Ever, ever: garden of my torture,
your body, flies from me forever,
the blood of your veins is in my mouth now,
already light-free for my death.
”
”
Federico García Lorca (Collected Poems)
“
I want to say something else about desire. I really do not know what it is. I experience something which, sometimes, if I pull it apart, I cannot make reason of. The word seems to me to fall apart under the pull and drag of its commodified shapes, under the weight of our artifice and our conceit. It is sometimes impossible to tell what is real from what is manufactured. We live in a world filled with commodified images of desire. Desire clings to widgets, chairs, fridges, cars, perfumes, shoes, jackets, golf clubs, basketballs, telephones, water, soap powder, houses, neighbourhoods. Even god. It clings to an endless list of objects. It clings to the face of television sets and movie screens. It is glaciered in assigned objects, it is petrified in repetitive cliched gestures. Their repetition is tedious, the look and sound of them tedious. We become the repetition despite our best efforts. We become numb. And though against the impressive strength of this I can't hope to say all that desire might be, I wanted to talk about it not as it is sold to us but as one collects it, piece by piece, proceeding through a life. I wanted to say that life, if we are lucky, is a collection of aesthetic experiences as it is a collection of pratical experiences, which may be one and the same sometimes, and which if we are lucky we make a sense of. Making sense may be what desire is. Or, putting the senses back together.
”
”
Dionne Brand (A Map to the Door of No Return)
“
running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors. The thought that his father's death had made no difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper. "Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, springing
”
”
Edith Wharton (Edith Wharton: Collection of 115 Works with analysis and historical background (Annotated and Illustrated) (Annotated Classics))
“
From all enchanted things of earth and air, this preciousness has been drawn. From the south wind that breathed a century and a half over the green wheat; from the perfume of the growing grasses waving over heavy-laden clover and laughing veronica, hiding the green finches, baffling the bee; from rose-lined hedge, woodbine, and cornflower, azure blue, where yellowing wheat stalks crowd up under the shadow of green firs. All the devious brooklets’ sweetness where the iris stays the sunlight; all the wild woods hold of beauty; all the broad hills of thyme and freedom thrice a hundred years repeated. “A hundred years of cowslips, bluebells, violets; purple spring and golden autumn; sunshine, shower, and dewy mornings; the night immortal; all the rhythm of time unrolling. A chronicle unwritten and past all power of writing; who shall preserve a record of the petals that fell from the roses a century ago? The swallows to the house-tops three hundred — times think of that! Thence she sprang, and the world yearns toward her beauty as to flowers that are past. The loveliness of seventeen is centuries old. That is why passion is almost sad.
”
”
Theodore Dreiser (Delphi Collected Works of Theodore Dreiser (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 25))
“
And what of all these spices? They're worth a pretty fortune." She waves a juddering arm across the table, at the tins and glass jars and earthenware pots. All at once a shaft of thin northern light swoops over them, jolting them into luminous life: bubbled glass jars of briny green peppercorns, salted capers, gleaming vanilla pods, rusted cinnamon sticks, all leaping and glinting. The sudden startling beauty of it, the palette of hues--ocher, terra-cotta, shades of earth and sand and grass---the pale trembling light. All thoughts of running a boardinghouse vanish.
I reach for a jar, lift its cork lid. The scent of bark, earth, roots, sky. And for a second I am somewhere else. "The mysterious scent of a secret kingdom," I murmur. The jar contains little pellets, brown, spherical, unexotic. How marvelous that something so plain can have such an enthralling perfume, I think.
"Oh, Miss Eliza. Always the poetess! It's only allspice." Cook gives a wan smile and gestures at the ceiling, where long bunches of herbs hang from a rack. Rosemary, tansy, sage, nettles, woodruff. "And what of these? All summer I was collecting these and they still ain't properly dry."
"May I lower it?" Not waiting for an answer I wind down the rack until the drying herbs are directly in front of me---a farmyard sweetness, a woody sappy scent, the smell of bruised apples and ripe earth and crushed ferns.
”
”
Annabel Abbs (Miss Eliza's English Kitchen)
“
No matter how many times I read the novel, I am always moved by the scene in which the pastor empties the offering can in front of the congregation, begins to count the money, and tells them it is not enough. He reminds them that one of their own, Helen Robinson, needs help while her husband is in jail. He then closes the church doors and announces that no one will leave until they’ve collected ten dollars. I can honestly say I have never witnessed this in a church service, have never heard of it happening, and can’t even imagine it taking place in real life, but there is something so moving about the pastoral determination of the reverend. In the silence that follows, he begins to call out by name the churchgoers who have not contributed enough. Scout tells us that after several long and uncomfortable moments, the ten dollars are finally collected and the church doors are unlocked. How could you read this scene and not think that we need more pastors like Reverend Sykes of First Purchase Church? You can almost feel the discomfort of the closed door, the sweating, the heat of the room, the smell of perfume, the rhythm of people fanning themselves to stay cool, and Reverend Sykes’s eyes raking over each parishioner as he scans the sanctuary, determined to make sure that Helen Robinson can feed her family that week. Isn’t this the way church should work? Not a soul openly questions the reverend’s authority in this scene. They are set on caring for one another. This was the way the early church operated in caring for its own community: “And so it turned out that not a person among them was needy. Those who owned fields or houses sold them and brought the price of the sale to the apostles and made an offering of it. The apostles then distributed it according to each person’s need” (Acts 4:34–35 MSG).
”
”
Matt Litton (The Mockingbird Parables: Transforming Lives through the Power of Story)
“
Young men seemed to collect by her side, ready with drinks and conversation. She tanned quickly and easily, her delicate limbs oiled and gleaming. In the evening, she made the most of her new tan in low-cut clinging evening dresses in white or black.
”
”
Kathleen Tessaro (The Perfume Collector)
“
Are you Mr. Bronson? We've come to teach you your manners.” Zachary flashed a grin at Holly. “I didn't realize when we struck our bargain that I was getting two of you.” Cautiously Rose reached up for her mother's gloved hand. “Is this where we're going to live, Mama? Is there a room for me?” Zachary sat on his haunches and stared into the little girl's face with a smile. “I believe a room right next to your mother's has been prepared for you,” he told her. His gaze fell to the mass of sparkling objects in Rose's hands. “What is that, Miss Rose?” “My button string.” The child let some of the length fall to the ground, displaying a line of carefully strung buttons… picture buttons etched with flowers, fruit or butterflies, ones made of molded black glass and a few of painted enamel and paper. “This one is my perfume button,” Rose said proudly, fingering a large one with velvet backing. She lifted it to her nose and inhaled deeply. “Mama puts her perfume on it for me, to make it smell nice.” As Rose extended it toward him, Zachary ducked his head and detected a faint flowery fragrance that he recognized instantly. “Yes,” he said softly, glancing up at Lady Holly's blushing face. “That smells just like your mama.” “Rose,” Holly said, clearly perturbed, “come with me—ladies do not remain talking on the drive-” “I don't have any buttons like that,” Rose told Zachary, ignoring her mother's words as she stared at one of the large solid gold buttons that adorned his coat. Gazing in the direction of the child's dainty finger, Zachary saw that a miniature hunting landscape was engraved on the surface of his top button. He had never looked closely enough to notice before. “Allow me the honor of adding to your collection, Miss Rose,” he said, reaching inside his coat to extract a small silver folding knife. Deftly he cut the threads holding the button to his coat and handed the object to the excited little girl. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Bronson,” Rose exclaimed. “Thank you!
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Where Dreams Begin)
“
A friend of mine who studies tropical insects showed me a video of orchid bees crowding around a crater in a rotting log. Male orchid bees collect scents from the world and amass them into a cocktail that they use to court females. They are perfume makers. Mating takes seconds, but gathering and blending their scents takes their entire adult lives. Although he hadn’t yet tested the hypothesis, my friend had a strong hunch that the bees were harvesting fungal compounds to add to their bouquets.
”
”
Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures)
“
A perfume collects these fragmented histories into a single borderless substance, a seamless composition of oils and resins distilled from plants that might be strangers in nature, from countries with a violent colonial relationship, like French lavender and Haitian vetiver.
”
”
Tanaïs (In Sensorium: Notes for My People)
“
Their primary customers are upper-income women between thirty and fifty years sold.
The average markup on a handbag is ten to twelve times production cost.
Perfume has, for more than seventy years, served as an introduction to a luxury brand.
The message was clear: buy our brand and you too, will live a luxury life.
The contradiction between personal indulgence and conspicuous consumption is the crux of the luxury business today: the convergence of its history with its current reality.
Today, luxury brand items are collected like baseball cards, displayed like artwork, brandished like iconography.
The tycoons have shifted the focus from what the product is to what is represents.
Perfume has a mystical, magical quality. It catches your attention, enchants you. It complements and enhances your personality. it stirs emotion, within you and others around you. Perfume was a link between gods and mortals. It was a way to contact the gods, Hermes's Jean-Claude Ellena told me. Now it is a profane link: it's between you and me.
Contentment is natural wealth. Luxury is artificial poverty. Socrates
More than anything else today, the handbag tells the story of a woman: her reality, her dreams.
Oscar Wilde said elegance is power.
If it would abolish avarice, you must abolish its mother, luxury. Cicero
People don't believe there is a difference between real and fake anymore. Bernard Arnault's marketing plan had worked: consumers don't buy luxury branded items for what they are, but for what they represent.
Luxury is the ease of a T-shirt in a very expensive dress. If you don't have it, you are not a person used to luxury. You are just a rich person who can buy staff. Karl Lagerfeld
Luxury is exclusivity, it is made for you and no one else has it. At a minimum, it must be impeccable. Maximum, unique.
If you do luxury, Louboutin explained, you have to treat people in a human way and you have to be elegant. You can't ask poor people in bad conditions to make beautiful things.
”
”
Dana Thomas (Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster)
“
On her way to work the next morning, she is certain this will be one of her last days in Sarajevo. Looking around, she sees how the normal rhythm of the city has been broken and is amazed she didn’t make up her mind to leave before now. Bosnian Serb snipers lie behind sandbags on the tops of buildings and take aim at people in the streets below as if they are sparrows. Sarajevans - old, young, men, women, Muslim, Croat, Serb - dart across the roads in zigzags in an attempt to dodge the bullets. On the tram, passengers duck their heads in a wave when they pass in front of the Jewish Cemetery, where a snipers’ nest is known to be located.
Disembarking, a series of blasts sound nearby and she freezes on the tram steps. The man behind pushes her off. They run to take cover in the stone-arched entrance of a locked-up carpet shop. Perhaps a dozen people press up against each other, coffee breath, perfume and the smell of their sweat intermingling. Each explosion sends a collective tremor through them. When they pull apart some twenty minutes later, they don’t look at each other. They brush down their clothes, straighten their shoulders and move off quickly.
Zora stares after them, in shock. It’s a quarter to ten on a Tuesday morning. She can’t live like this.
”
”
Priscilla Morris (Black Butterflies)
“
It was as though on the smell of the rain came her perfume still, and in the empty theater I could hear the throb of her beating heart.
”
”
Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles Collection: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned)
“
In the last decade and a half a revival of plant behavior research had brought countless new realizations to botany, more than forty years after an irresponsible best-selling book nearly snuffed out the field for good. The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973, captured the public imagination on a global scale. Written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, the book was a mix of real science, flimsy experiments, and unscientific projection. In one chapter, Tompkins and Bird suggested that plants could feel and hear—and that they preferred Beethoven to rock and roll. In another, a former CIA agent named Cleve Backster hooked up a polygraph test to his houseplant and imagined the plant being set on fire. The polygraph needle went wild, which would mean the plant was experiencing a surge in electrical activity. In humans, a reading like that was believed to denote a surge of stress. The plant, according to Backster, was responding to his malevolent thoughts. The implication was that there existed not only a sort of plant consciousness but also plant mind-reading. The book was an immediate and meteoric success on the popular market, surprising for a book about plant science. Paramount put out a feature film about it. Stevie Wonder wrote the soundtrack. The first pressings of the album version were sent out scented with floral perfume. To its many astonished readers, the book offered a new way to view the plants all around them, which up until then had seemed ornamental, passive, more akin to the world of rocks than animals. It also aligned with the advent of New Age culture, which was ready to inhale stories about how plants were as alive as we are. People began talking to their houseplants, and leaving classical music playing for their ficus when they went out. But it was a beautiful collection of myths.
”
”
Zoë Schlanger (The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth)
“
AS their peculiar perfume is the chief association with spices, so sorcery is allied in every memory to gypsies. And as it has not escaped many poets that there is something more strangely sweet and mysterious in the scent of cloves than in that of flowers, so the attribute of inherited magic power adds to the romance of these picturesque wanderers. Both the spices and the Romany come from the far East—the fatherland of divination and enchantment. The latter have been traced with tolerable accuracy, If we admit their affinity with the Indian Dom and Domar, back to the p. 2 threshold of history, or well-nigh into prehistoric times, and in all ages they, or their women, have been engaged, as if by elvish instinct, in selling enchant. merits, peddling prophecies and palmistry, and dealing with the devil generally ill a small retail way. As it was of old so it is to-day— Ki shan i Romani— Adoi san' i chov'hani. Wherever gypsies go, There the witches are, we know.
”
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Charles Godfrey Leland (THREE Collections of Charles Godfrey Leland: GYPSY SORCERY and FORTUNE TELLING, ETRUSCAN ROMAN, ARADIA or THE GOSPEL OF THE WITCHES (Annotated History of Charles Godfrey Leland))
“
Whenever I moved to a new city or started a new relationship, I’d always change my perfume,” she’d told me. “That way I’d be able to look back and relive my best memories from that time whenever I smelled it. So whenever you feel a shift or start a new chapter in life, find a new scent to go with it.
”
”
Mikki Brammer (The Collected Regrets of Clover)
“
There is no mention that his mother collects perfume bottles as well, or the fact that I have something in common with her, and I won’t analyze how it makes me feel that he doesn’t let me know this is something we share.
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Ashley Elston (First Lie Wins)
“
I waited for her outside her house and saw her approaching in the aqua-blue dress I had gifted her on her last birthday. She obviously remembered my love for that colour on her and how I always told her that it complimented her skin beautifully. My heartbeat increased just a little as she sat in my car and the scent of her signature perfume- Chanel No 5- diffused in the air of my car. Her sleek-straight hair fell on her face.
"Hi Neel. How have you been?"
I thought about the first month of sleepless nights, crying, sulking and overthinking and said, "I've been okay.
”
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Insha Juneja (Imperfect Mortals : A Collection of Short Stories)
“
A Christmas Truce
What would I like for Christmas?
A close friend wants to know.
Perfume? A clock? A spa day?
Some tickets for a show?
‘I need ideas by Monday,’
She huffs, as if I’m not
Sufficiently respectful
Of her present-buying slot,
Which will expire by Tuesday,
Her harried tone implies.
Art books? Posh wine? New teapot?
Brainstorm! Prioritise!
What do I want for Christmas?
I want you not to ask.
I’d rather get no gifts at all
Than be assigned the task
Of emailing a wish list
(One I must first create)
To all my friends and family
Before a certain date.
Can I propose a Christmas truce
To make my dreams come true?
Create no work for me and I’ll
Create no work for you.
I’ve got enough possessions –
Shoes, coats, a diamond ring –
I want not to be asked to do
A time-consuming thing.
Yes, that’s a proper present –
Abstract, but no less real.
What do you mean it seems as if
I don’t care how you feel?
ALL RIGHT! I’ll have a teapot.
What? Then wrap it in a fleece.
Yes, I will ring to say it got here
Safely, in one piece.
”
”
Sophie Hannah (Marrying the Ugly Millionaire: New and Collected Poems)
“
One thing that has surprised Julie about going through the process of watching herself die is how vivid her world has become. Everything that she used to take for granted produces a sense of revelation, as if she were a child again. Tastes - the sweetness of a strawberry, its juice dripping onto her chin; a buttery pastry melting in her mouth, Smells - flowers on a front lawn, a colleague's perfume, seaweed washed up on the shore, Matt's sweaty body in bed at night. Sounds - the strings on a cello, the screech of a car, her nephew's laughter. Experiences - dancing at a birthday party, people-watching at Starbucks, buying a cute dress, opening the mail. All of this, no matter how mundane, delights her to no end. She's become hyper-present. When people delude themselves into believing they have all the time in the world, she's noticed, they get lazy. p310
”
”
Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone & Into the Magic Shop 2 Books Collection Set)
“
You are reborn according to the karma you create and bring with you from one life to the next, but whatever your past life may have been, it bares little resemblance to who you are today because what we consider ourselves to be, the ‘me’ that we identify so strongly with, is merely a collection of patterns, habits, thoughts, ideas, impressions, and histories that have been cobbled together from various causes and conditions that arose due to prior karma; the self is an illusion, as empty as a rainbow. What does get reincarnated is purely an impartial, impersonal, and wholly energetic field that has become imbued with a positivity and/or negativity outside of any identifiable qualities of self.
”
”
Michael Imperioli (The Perfume Burned His Eyes)
“
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”
”
kkgiftstreet
“
Whenever I moved to a new city or started a new relationship, I’d always change my perfume,” she’d told me. “That way I’d be able to look back and relive my best memories from that time whenever I smelled it. So whenever you feel a shift or start a new chapter in life, find a new scent to go with it.” I’d
”
”
Mikki Brammer (The Collected Regrets of Clover)
“
Do you rememberin’ Assumption, Calixta?” he asked in a low voice broken by passion. Oh! she remembered; for in Assumption he had kissed her and kissed and kissed her; until his senses would well nigh fail, and to save her he would resort to a desperate flight. If she was not an immaculate dove in those days, she was still inviolate; a passionate creature whose very defenselessness had made her defense, against which his honor forbade him to prevail. Now well, now her lips seemed in a manner free to be tasted, as well as her round, white throat and her whiter breasts. They did not heed the crashing torrents, and the roar of the elements made her laugh as she lay in his arms. She was a revelation in that dim, mysterious chamber; as white as the couch she lay upon. Her firm, elastic flesh that was knowing for the first time its birthright, was like a creamy lily that the sun invites to contribute its breath and perfume to the undying life of the world. The generous abundance of her passion, without guile or trickery, was like a white flame which penetrated and found response in depths of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been reached. When he touched her breasts they gave themselves up in quivering ecstasy, inviting his lips. Her mouth was a fountain of delight. And when he possessed her, they seemed to swoon together at the very borderland of life’s mystery. He stayed cushioned upon her, breathless, dazed, enervated, with his heart beating like a hammer upon her. With one hand she clasped his head, her lips lightly touching his forehead. The other hand stroked with a soothing rhythm his muscular shoulders. The growl of the thunder was distant and passing away. The rain beat softly upon the shingles, inviting them to drowsiness and sleep. But they dared not yield.
”
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Elsinore Books (Classic Short Stories: The Complete Collection: All 100 Masterpieces)
“
I favor the smell of sweet-grass. It always makes me think of my mother.” “She was fond of it?” asked Anne. “Not that I knows on. Dunno’s she ever saw any sweet-grass. No, it’s because it has a kind of motherly perfume — not too young, you understand — something kind of seasoned and wholesome and dependable — jest like a mother.
”
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L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables: The Complete Collection (Anne of Green Gables, #1-8))
“
The sun crouched behind leaves, but the trees had long since walked away. The meaning that surfaces comes to me aslant and I go to meet it, stepping out of my body word for word, until I am everything at once: the perfume of the world in which I go under, a skindiver remembering air
”
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Rita Dove (Collected Poems: 1974–2004)
“
Kendall's shoulders droop. "My parents said I need to concentrate on grades anyway. So I guess I'm done. Retired at the ripe old age of seventeen."
"But don't you want to skate?" I ask the whole table, but I'm looking at Kendall especially. She and I have been on every team together since we were nine. I don't know what a hockey bench would smell like without her rotating seasonal perfume collection.
”
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Carrie S. Allen
“
He loved the shop, the smells of the naphthas and benzenes, the ammonias, all the alkalis and fats, all the solvents and gritty lavas, the silken detergents and ultimate soaps, like the smells, he decided of flesh itself, of release, the disparate chemistries of pore and sweat—a sweat shop—the strange wooly-smelling acids that collected in armpits and atmosphered pubic hair, the flameless combustion of urine and gabardine mixing together to create all the body’s petty suggestive alimentary toxins. The sexuality of it. The men’s garments one kind, the women’s another, confused, deflected, masked by residual powders, by the oily invisible resins of deodorant and perfume, by the concocted flower and the imagined fruit—by all fabricated flavor. And the hanging in the air, too—where would they go?—dirt, the thin, exiguous human clays, divots, ash and soils, dust devils of being.
”
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Stanley Elkin