Perfume Obsession Quotes

When does real love begin? At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity. At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love? At first power, power, then the wound, and love, and love and fears, and the loss of the self, and the gift, and slavery. At first I ruled, loved less; then more, then slavery. Slavery to his image, his odor, the craving, the hunger, the thirst, the obsession.

I've apparently been the victim of growing up, which apparently happens to all of us at one point or another. It's been going on for quite some time now, without me knowing it. I've found that growing up can mean a lot of things. For me, it doesn't mean I should become somebody completely new and stop loving the things I used to love. It means I've just added more things to my list. Like for example, I'm still beyond obsessed with the winter season and I still start putting up strings of lights in September. I still love sparkles and grocery shopping and really old cats that are only nice to you half the time. I still love writing in my journal and wearing dresses all the time and staring at chandeliers. But some new things I've fallen in love with -- mismatched everything. Mismatched chairs, mismatched colors, mismatched personalities. I love spraying perfumes I used to wear when I was in high school. It brings me back to the days of trying to get a close parking spot at school, trying to get noticed by soccer players, and trying to figure out how to avoid doing or saying anything uncool, and wishing every minute of every day that one day maybe I'd get a chance to win a Grammy. Or something crazy and out of reach like that. ;) I love old buildings with the paint chipping off the walls and my dad's stories about college. I love the freedom of living alone, but I also love things that make me feel seven again. Back then naivety was the norm and skepticism was a foreign language, and I just think every once in a while you need fries and a chocolate milkshake and your mom. I love picking up a cookbook and closing my eyes and opening it to a random page, then attempting to make that recipe. I've loved my fans from the very first day, but they've said things and done things recently that make me feel like they're my friends -- more now than ever before. I'll never go a day without thinking about our memories together.

The concept that really gets the goat of the gay-hater, the idea that really spins their melon and sickens their stomachs is that most terrible and terrifying of all human notions, love. That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand. Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the world's full octave. Love as Agape, Eros and Philos; love as infatuation, obsession and lust; love as torture, euphoria, ecstasy and oblivion (this is beginning to read like a Calvin Klein perfume catalogue); love as need, passion and desire.

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.

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book — to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor — to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire — to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower — to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind — to lose all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in — Such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation.

Metaphor is the currency of knowledge. I have spent my life learning incredible amounts of disparate, disconnected, obscure, useless pieces of knowledge, and they have turned out to be, almost all of them, extremely useful.

Call me obsessed, color me consumed I’ve always been the type to notice The smell of a rose in bloom, But let me confess, this is new You’ve stopped my heart, let it resume And I, to finish, must tell it true I’m high on your perfume.

It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes...

HE is a Master who may teach without it being totally labelled teaching; HE is a student who can learn without being obsessed by learning.

All molecules pulse with vibrations. They shimmer and wiggle and sing with the vibrations of the electron strings that hold them together, which means molecules are, oddly enough, a sort of musical instrument.

Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colourless liquid with a slight chemical odour. It is used as an antiseptic, a solvent, in medical wipes and antibacterial formulas because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins. Ethanol is an important industrial ingredient. Ethanol is a good general purpose solvent and is found in paints, tinctures, markers and personal care products such as perfumes and deodorants. The largest single use of ethanol is as an engine fuel and fuel additive. In other words, we drink, for fun, the same thing we use to make rocket fuel, house paint, anti-septics, solvents, perfumes, and deodorants and to denature, i.e. to take away the natural properties of, or kill, living organisms. Which might make sense on some level if we weren’t a generation of green minded, organic, health-conscious, truth seeking individuals. But we are. We read labels, we shun gluten, dairy, processed foods, and refined sugars. We buy organic, we use natural sunscreen and beauty products. We worry about fluoride in our water, smog in our air, hydrogenated oils in our food, and we debate whether plastic bottles are safe to drink from. We replace toxic cleaning products with Mrs. Myers and homemade vinegar concoctions. We do yoga, we run, we SoulCycle and Fitbit, we go paleo and keto, we juice, we cleanse. We do coffee enemas and steam our yonis, and drink clay and charcoal, and shoot up vitamins, and sit in infrared foil boxes, and hire naturopaths, and shamans, and functional doctors, and we take nootropics and we stress about our telomeres. These are all real words. We are hyper-vigilant about everything we put into our body, everything we do to our body, and we are proud of this. We Instagram how proud we are of this, and we follow Goop and Well+Good, and we drop 40 bucks on an exercise class because there are healing crystals in the floor. The global wellness economy is estimated to be worth $4 trillion. $4 TRILLION DOLLARS. We are on an endless and expensive quest for wellness and vitality and youth. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.

As he fills me, I wonder if—in the same way that sex makes its own unique perfume—we don’t really “make” love. As in create, manufacture, evoke an independent element in the air around us, and if enough of us did it really well, for real, not just for the hell of it, we could change the world. Because when he’s in me, I feel the space around us changing, charging, and it seems to set off some kind of feedback loop, where the more he touches me, the more I need him to. Having sex with Barrons sates my need. Then feeds it. Sates, then feeds. It’s a never-ending cycle. I get out of bed with him, frantic to be back in it again. And I— “—hated you for it,” he says gently. That was my line. “I never get enough, Mac. Drives me bug-fuck. I should kill you for what you make me feel.” I understand perfectly. He is my vulnerability. I would become Shiva, the world-eater, for him.

It makes everyone nervous, smelling,” he says re the vial, “because smell is such a strong sense.

I find that physics is like oysters—it’s best first thing in the morning—so I always have these physics books in the loo.

Don’t be afraid of aging. As the saying goes, don’t be afraid of anything but fear itself. Find “your” perfume before you turn thirty. Wear it for the next thirty years. No one should ever see your gums when you talk or laugh. If you own only one sweater, make sure it’s cashmere. Wear a black bra under your white blouse, like two notes on a sheet of music. One must live with the opposite sex, not against them. Except when making love. Be unfaithful: cheat on your perfume, but only on cold days. Go to the theater, to museums, and to concerts as often as possible: it gives you a healthy glow. Be aware of your qualities and your faults. Cultivate them in private but don’t obsess. Make it look easy. Everything you do should seem effortless and graceful. Not too much makeup, too many colors, too many accessories …  Take a deep breath and keep it simple. Your look should always have one thing left undone—the devil is in the details. Be your own knight in shining armor. Cut your own hair or ask your sister to do it for you. Of course you know celebrity hairdressers, but only as friends. Always be fuckable: when standing in line at the bakery on a Sunday morning, buying champagne in the middle of the night, or even picking the kids up from school. You never know. Either go all gray or no gray hair. Salt and pepper is for the table.

Now I wanted only one thing, in this room with the smell of Helen's perfume and clothes and the bed and the twilight: to possess her with everything that was in me, and if there was one thing that tormented me and pierced the flat dull sense of loss, it was the realization that nature wouldn't let me possess her even more fully and deeply. If only I could spread myself over her like a blanket, if only I could have had a thousand hands and mouths, if only I could have held her in a perfect concave mold, skin to skin without intervening space—but even then there would be a last regret, for still it would be only skin to skin instead of blood in blood: we could be together, but never completely united.

Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress bids me wear them, warm them, until evening when I'll brush her hair. At six, I place them round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her, resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope. She's beautiful. I dream about her in my attic bed; picture her dancing with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent beneath her French perfume, her milky stones. I dust her shoulders with a rabbit's foot, watch the soft blush seep through her skin like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass my red lips part as though I want to speak. Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see her every movement in my head.... Undressing, taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way she always does.... And I lie here awake, knowing the pearls are cooling even now in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night I feel their absence and I burn.

Perfume was the first to go, but I’d been expecting that. Scented detergent followed, then dryer sheets. I wasn’t sorry to give up raw onions or hot sauce.

As a counterpoint to all the staleness, there were the salty, biting North Sea breezes, the slightly fishy sweetness of cold damp sand and the sharp grass that grows in it. In summer the manicured grass of quad lawns and night-time bonfires on the beach. A kiss in the dunes from a dashing young chap with beer and ciggies on his breath, and a faint whiff of horse on his shirt. My scents for university days are: Anaïs Anaïs by Cacharel Lily of the Valley by Yardley Obsession by Calvin Klein Sel Marin by Heeley Wood Sage and Sea Salt Cologne by Jo Malone London Bas de Soieby Serge Lutens Cuir de Russie by Chanel Peau de Bête by Liquides Imaginaires

Wait. Your mom is Victoria Lane!?” Lucky asked. Holy shit! That’s where he knew her from. That’s why her lips looked so familiar. That’s why he’d felt like he’d looked into her eyes before. He had. “Yep.” “You were in a perfume or clothing ad with her when you were a teenager!” Lucky had ripped out every ad he’d found in magazines his senior year. He’d never particularly thought that Victoria was that hot, but when he’d seen her daughter beside her, Lucky had been one smitten kitten. In fact, Deanna had been his first and only crush. He just hadn’t known it was her. Deanna didn’t share his enthusiasm. “Yeah, I was.” “I knew you looked familiar. God, I was obsessed with you. I stole every ad I could find and I would fold it in half and pin it up on my wall so only you were showing.” Her head spun around, and she looked…mad. “No, you didn’t.” Oh well. He wasn’t about to try to dig himself out of this one. His only move was to dig in deeper. “Yes. I did. I thought you were so damn hot—” Her hand rose defensively. “Lucky, stop. I know that’s not true—” “You don’t know shit,” he snapped back, still feeling the adrenaline from earlier. His tone made him cringe, so he softened his voice. “Sorry, but you don’t.” “Whatever.” She crossed her arms in front of her. Lucky saw it for what it was: a protective stance. But he’d be damned if she was going to feel she had to protect herself from him. He would never hurt her. “Look, I’m sorry if it pisses you off that I had hundreds of pictures of you all over my wall and I used to jack it to you morning and night—” “What!?” she screeched. Glancing over, he saw the horror in her beautiful expressive eyes, but her lips were curled a little at the edges and not set in a grim expression. So he hadn’t pissed her off that bad by his oh-so-shocking admission. “Sorry to burst your bubble, but I don’t think there was a red-blooded teenage boy who wasn’t jerking it to those pictures.” He’d said it to lighten the mood, but he was getting the same feeling he’d gotten when he’d seen Casey heading towards Deanna on the dance floor. One word filled his mind. Mine. Deanna let out a harsh laugh. “Yeah, maybe, but it wasn’t me they were looking at.” Lucky took his eyes off the road just long enough to see in the set of her jaw and her protective body language that she wasn’t joking. She really believed that she wasn’t hot. Or beautiful. And her mom was. Then it hit him. She’d grown up the daughter of a supermodel and a professional baseball player. Maybe living in the shadows all of those years had caused her not to see herself for who she really was. It was time to shed some light on that subject. Instead of arguing with her, Lucky decided to enlighten her. “My favorite was the one with you wearing a white tank top and jeans. Just a tiny sliver of your stomach was showing, and I used to imagine running my finger along that area and how soft your skin would feel. I loved how that one piece of your hair fell over your shoulder. Your eyes were looking right in the camera, and your lips were so full and… I won’t even tell you what I pictured you doing with them.” Deanna sounded breathless as she said, “Oh.” “Do you believe me now?” he asked as he kept his eyes on the winding, dark highway illuminated only by his headlights. “Yes,” she said quietly. Then he felt her turn towards him, and her voice sounded lighter and hell of a lot sassier as she asked, “You know I was only thirteen when I shot that, right?” “You were what!?” Lucky’s voice rose in shock, and it took everything in his power not to swerve the truck into the other lane. Now, he was the one who didn’t believe her. “No way. There is no way you were thirteen!” “Yep. I really was. Whatever you were picturing me doi—” “Stop!” If Lucky could’ve, he would have covered his ears and said, “Na-na-na-na-na! I’m not listening to you.

Amazon’s Leadership Principles6 Customer Obsession. Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers. Ownership. Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say, “that’s not my job.” Invent and Simplify. Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here.” As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time. Are Right, A Lot. Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs. Learn and Be Curious. Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them. Hire and Develop the Best. Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice. Insist on the Highest Standards. Leaders have relentlessly high standards—many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high-quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed. Think Big. Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers. Bias for Action. Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking. Frugality. Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense. Earn Trust. Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.

In other words, we drink—for fun—the same thing we use to make rocket fuel, house paint, antiseptics, solvents, perfumes, and deodorants, and to denature (i.e., take away the natural properties of, or kill) living organisms. Which might make sense on some level if we weren’t a generation of green-minded, organic, health-conscious, truth-seeking individuals. But we are.

My resolution to “Embrace good smells” has developed into a full-blown obsession. A few of my favorite perfumes: CB I Hate Perfume    Demeter Fragrance Library    Frédéric Malle To See a Flower    Fireplace    Lys Méditerranée Hay    Pure Soap    En Passant Tea/Rose    Baby Powder    Gardenia de Nuit On the Beach 1966 Memory of Kindness         (for the Fleur Mécanique) The

I slice fresh garlic, rub it into the meat with olive oil, then insert the thin wafers into tiny slits I cut along the grain. After rinsing my hands, I hold them to my face, inhale the garlic perfume still on my skin. I could easily wipe it away on the faucet, a spoon, any piece of stainless steel, but I've never understood why people find it offensive. It's the smell of anticipation, the promise of a wonderful meal in the offing. Opening the spice cabinet, I breathe in the fragrance of all those jars I left behind: saffron threads, cardamom pods, star anise, Tahitian vanilla. I almost weep at the sight of my Fleur de Sel. No one ever gets my obsession with sea salt, especially expensive sea salt. They don't understand that it brightens the flavor of food, wakes it up, like a condiment. Regular table salt just makes food salty.

When Aru opened her eyes, she found herself in the only place in the world that made her feel like she could breathe a bit easier, a place where broken things could be fixed, where all the answers lay in plain sight, where the aisles held the rare perfume of possibility tinged ever so slightly with the sweetness of mulch and wood chips…. “Aru, you really need to get over your Home Depot obsession,” said Nikita, staring down with her hands firmly planted on her hips. “Can’t you dream about someplace else?” “Nope,” said Aru. Of course, in the dream, Home Depot didn’t really look the same. First, Aru was sitting in an armchair that seemed to be made of cotton candy for no apparent reason. For another, the aisle banner over her head said FLOORING, but instead of the shelves being filled with things like wood laminate or vinyl plank, she was staring at a rotating row of moon jellyfish and miniature thunderclouds. At the end of the aisle, which somehow seemed as if it were hundreds of feet away and yet close enough to touch, stood a huge podium where an endless supply of doors rotated.

Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beach somnolent whale. No one could put anything together, that was the whole problem. She had recently read an article that listed all the reasons why monarch butterflies were dying, before segueing proudly into an account of taking a plane across America so the writer could cheer herself up by seeing monarch butterflies. On the plane she complained about the air pollution of jet fuel and perfume, how it gave her allergies, but she didn't connect the casual habit of flying thousands of miles with the collapse of the butterflies. Kathy didn't blame her. The equations were too difficult, you knew intellectually, but you never really saw the consequences, since they tended to impact other poorer people in other poorer places. There is no away to throw things to didn't quite work as an axiom if you were a species that depended so stubbornly on the evidence of its own eyes.