“
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
”
”
John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)
“
I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.
”
”
Eve Babitz (Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.)
“
For with eyes made clear by many tears, and a heart softened by the tenderest sorrow, she recognized the beauty of her sister's life—uneventful, unambitious, yet full of the genuine virtues which 'smell sweet, and blossom in the dust', the self-forgetfulness that makes the humblest on earth remembered soonest in heaven, the true success which is possible to all.
”
”
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)
“
Take a drink every time you hear a lie.
You're a great cook.
(They say as you burn toast.)
You're so funny.
(You've never told a joke.)
You're so...
... handsome.
... ambitious.
... successful.
... strong.
(Are you drinking yet?)
You're so...
... charming.
... clever.
... sexy.
(Drink.)
So confident.
So shy.
So mysterious.
So open.
You are impossible, a paradox, a collection at odds.
You are everything to everyone.
The son they never had.
The friend they've always wanted.
A generous stranger.
A successful son.
A perfect gentleman.
A perfect partner.
A perfect...
Perfect...
(Drink.)
They love your body.
Your abs.
Your laugh.
The way you smell.
The sound of your voice.
They want you.
(Not you.)
They need you.
(Not you.)
They love you.
(Not you.)
You are whoever they want you to be.
You are more than enough, because you are not real.
You are perfect, because you don't exist.
(Not you.)
(Never You.)
They look at you and see whatever they want...
Because they don't see you at all.
”
”
Victoria Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue)
“
Cat saliva contains a natural deodorant which is why they lick themselves a lot. It’s been proven by zoologists that cats that lick the smell off themselves survive longer and have more successful offspring. It’s also their way of hiding themselves from predators like large snakes, lizards and other larger carnivorous mammals.
”
”
James Bowen (A Street Cat Named Bob: And How He Saved My Life)
“
Testosterone also increases confidence and optimism, while decreasing fear and anxiety.5 This explains the “winner” effect in lab animals, where winning a fight increases an animal’s willingness to participate in, and its success in, another such interaction. Part of the increased success probably reflects the fact that winning stimulates testosterone secretion, which increases glucose delivery and metabolism in the animal’s muscles and makes his pheromones smell scarier. Moreover, winning increases the number of testosterone receptors in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (the way station through which the amygdala communicates with the rest of the brain), increasing its sensitivity to the hormone. Success in everything from athletics to chess to the stock
”
”
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
“
Henry successfully kept his mind on the game, which might seem strange for a boy who slept beside a wall of magic. But baseball was as magical to him as a green, mossy mountain covered in ancient trees. What's more, baseball was a magic he could run around in and laugh about. While the magic of the cupboards was not necessarily good, the smell of leather mixed with dusty sweat and spitting and running through sparse grass after a small ball couldn't be anything else.
”
”
N.D. Wilson (100 Cupboards (100 Cupboards, #1))
“
Success is like a deodorant it covers all the dirty smell
”
”
Manoj
“
She smells like passion; like irresistible desire and temptation. She’s eclipsing in a daytime and shining at night. She smells like nakedness, even when she is warmly dressed. She has wild eyes. She smells like seduction; she is both an apple and a snake. She smells like great expectations; like success; like centuries-old glory. She’s like the last refuge. She smells like a final wish. She smells like a new beginning.
”
”
Damian Corvium
“
Some folks want the lights of cities, the admiration of women, and the fame that comes with success. Me, I just want the trail unwinding ahead of me, the view from the top of the ridge, and the smell of a wood-smoke fire.
”
”
Louis L'Amour (Milo Talon)
“
But what's important is that you enjoy and appreciate every day, and that's something you can accomplish by just living in the moment. Don't look behind you. Unless someone yells, "Look out behind you!" Then you should definitely look behind you because there's a good chance a Frisbee is being thrown at your head or, if you're in a movie, an attractive teenage vampire is about to attack you.
Otherwise, don't look back and don't spend too much time worrying about the future. Stay in the present. There are a few ways to do that. Stop and smell the roses. Wake up and smell the coffee. Enjoy the sweet smell of success. I guess just keep taking big whiffs of stuff because it seems like the more we smell, the happier we are going to be. You know what I mean.
”
”
Ellen DeGeneres (Seriously... I'm Kidding)
“
Change your life! Wake up and smell the Cosmic Ordering success.
”
”
Stephen Richards (Cosmic Ordering Guide)
“
Success has got no taste or smell and when you get used to it, it's as if it didn't exist.
”
”
Pedro Almodóvar
“
I hate the smell of success, because most of the time it smells like sweat. Maybe that’s why I’m poor, because every pore on my body is dry.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
I Love the Smell of Success in the Shadows of Failure.
~Ayyaz Ameer Meo
”
”
Ayyaz Ameer Mayo
“
NINA
Your life is beautiful.
TRIGORIN
I see nothing especially lovely about it. [He looks at his watch] Excuse me, I must go at once, and begin writing again. I am in a hurry. [He laughs] You have stepped on my pet corn, as they say, and I am getting excited, and a little cross. Let us discuss this bright and beautiful life of mine, though. [After a few moments' thought] Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth--I write ceaselessly. I am, as it were, on a treadmill. I hurry for ever from one story to another, and can't help myself. Do you see anything bright and beautiful in that? Oh, it is a wild life! Even now, thrilled as I am by talking to you, I do not forget for an instant that an unfinished story is awaiting me. My eye falls on that cloud there, which has the shape of a grand piano; I instantly make a mental note that I must remember to mention in my story a cloud floating by that looked like a grand piano. I smell heliotrope; I mutter to myself: a sickly smell, the colour worn by widows; I must remember that in writing my next description of a summer evening. I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary store-room, thinking that some day they may be useful to me. As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no! Some new subject for a story is sure to come rolling through my brain like an iron cannonball. I hear my desk calling, and have to go back to it and begin to write, write, write, once more. And so it goes for everlasting. I cannot escape myself, though I feel that I am consuming my life. To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot. Am I not a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased? Yet it is always the same, same old story, till I begin to think that all this praise and admiration must be a deception, that I am being hoodwinked because they know I am crazy, and I sometimes tremble lest I should be grabbed from behind and whisked off to a lunatic asylum. The best years of my youth were made one continual agony for me by my writing. A young author, especially if at first he does not make a success, feels clumsy, ill-at-ease, and superfluous in the world. His nerves are all on edge and stretched to the point of breaking; he is irresistibly attracted to literary and artistic people, and hovers about them unknown and unnoticed, fearing to look them bravely in the eye, like a man with a passion for gambling, whose money is all gone. I did not know my readers, but for some reason I imagined they were distrustful and unfriendly; I was mortally afraid of the public, and when my first play appeared, it seemed to me as if all the dark eyes in the audience were looking at it with enmity, and all the blue ones with cold indifference. Oh, how terrible it was! What agony!
”
”
Anton Chekhov (The Seagull)
“
Silicon Valley’s success is built on the carcasses of its failures. In the Valley, failure is fertilizer. Like all fertilizer, though, it must be used wisely by a skilled farmer, otherwise it is useless and smells bad. As
”
”
Eric Weiner (The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (Creative Lessons in History))
“
Smell was our first sense, and it was so successful that in time the small lump of olfactory tissue atop the nerve cord grew into a brain. Our cerebral hemispheres were originally buds from our olfactory stalks. We think because we smelled.
”
”
Diane Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses)
“
The spiraling flights of moths appear haphazard only because of the mechanisms of olfactory tracking are so different from our own. Using binocular vision, we judge the location of an object by comparing the images from two eyes and tracking directly toward the stimulus. But for species relying on the sense of smell, the organism compares points in space, moves in the direction of the greater concentration, then compares two more points successively, moving in zigzags toward the source. Using olfactory navigation the moth detects currents of scent in the air and, by small increments, discovers how to move upstream.
”
”
Barbara Kingsolver (Prodigal Summer)
“
I am in love with everything around me,
the dotted white lines moving
across my teacher's blackboard, the smell of chalk, the flag jutting out from the wall and slowly swaying above.
There is nothing more beautiful that P.S. 106.
Nothing more perfect than my first-grade classroom.
No one more kind than Ms. Feilder, who meets me at the door each morning,
takes my hand from my sister's, smiles down and says,
Now that Jacqueline is here, the day can begin.
And I believe her.
Yes, I truly believe her.
”
”
Jacqueline Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming)
“
His wounds, incidentally, must have healed up by now, he felt no handicap anymore, which was astonishing; for, as recalled, after he had nicked his finger with a knife over a month ago, the injury had still been hurting the day before yesterday. "Am I less sensitive now?" he wondered, greedily sucking at the cheese, which had promptly exerted a more emphatic attraction on him than any of the other food. His eyes watered with contentment as he gulped down the cheese, the vegetables, and the sauce in rapid succession. By contrast, he did not relish the fresh foods, he could not even stand their smells, and he actually dragged the things he wanted to eat a short distance away.
”
”
Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories: The Great Short Works of Franz Kafka)
“
I blew a strand of hair out of my face and wandered to a table where spices and herbs were laid out in jewellike bowls. Rosemary, thyme, spearmint, cinnamon, cardamom. Their fragrance beckoned me. My fingers twitched.
A pinch of delicate reddish-orange threads lay in a clear bowl. They smelled of sunshine.
Saffron. For success.
I knew exactly what to make.
”
”
Rajani LaRocca (Midsummer's Mayhem)
“
In the months that followed he brought a rapid succession of cases to court—as he recalled, “smelling somewhat of midnight oil.
”
”
Anthony Everitt (Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician)
“
Company of good people will lead you to success, bad people are like stagnant water, they give you dirty smells and stop you from moving ahead.
”
”
Abid Hussain
“
How has the United States survived its terrible past and emerged smelling so sweet? Not by owning up to it, not by making reparations, not by apologizing to black Americans or native Americans, and certainly not by changing its ways (it exports its cruelties now). Like most other countries, the United States has rewritten its history. But what sets the United States apart from other countries, and puts it ahead in the race, is that it has enlisted the services of the most powerful, most successful publicity firm in the world: Hollywood.
”
”
Arundhati Roy (An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire)
“
As for describing the smell of a spaniel mixed with the smell of torches, laurels, incense, banners, wax candles and a garland of rose leaves crushed by a satin heel that has been laid up in camphor, perhaps Shakespeare, had he paused in the middle of writing Antony and Cleopatra — But Shakespeare did not pause. Confessing our inadequacy, then, we can but note that to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his life, meant mainly a succession of smells. Love, it must be supposed, was gradually losing its appeal. Smell remained. Now that they were established in Casa Guidi again, all had their avocations. Mr. Browning wrote regularly in one room; Mrs. Browning wrote regularly in another. The baby played in the nursery. But Flush wandered off into the streets of Florence to enjoy the rapture of smell. He threaded his path through main streets and back streets, through squares and alleys, by smell. He nosed his way from smell to smell; the rough, the smooth, the dark, the golden. He went in and out, up and down, where they beat brass, where they bake bread, where the women sit combing their hair, where the bird-cages are piled high on the causeway, where the wine spills itself in dark red stains on the pavement, where leather smells and harness and garlic, where cloth is beaten, where vine leaves tremble, where men sit and drink and spit and dice — he ran in and out, always with his nose to the ground, drinking in the essence; or with his nose in the air vibrating with the aroma. He slept in this hot patch of sun — how sun made the stone reek! he sought that tunnel of shade — how acid shade made the stone smell! He devoured whole bunches of ripe grapes largely because of their purple smell; he chewed and spat out whatever tough relic of goat or macaroni the Italian housewife had thrown from the balcony — goat and macaroni were raucous smells, crimson smells. He followed the swooning sweetness of incense into the violet intricacies of dark cathedrals; and, sniffing, tried to lap the gold on the window- stained tomb. Nor was his sense of touch much less acute. He knew Florence in its marmoreal smoothness and in its gritty and cobbled roughness. Hoary folds of drapery, smooth fingers and feet of stone received the lick of his tongue, the quiver of his shivering snout. Upon the infinitely sensitive pads of his feet he took the clear stamp of proud Latin inscriptions. In short, he knew Florence as no human being has ever known it; as Ruskin never knew it or George Eliot either.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (Flush)
“
He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairie, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story.
This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for a rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed, - these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces, - and this would always be his.
”
”
Willa Cather (A Lost Lady)
“
Identifying a potential threat feels curiously good. You’re like a gazelle that smells a lion and can’t relax until it sees where the lion is. Seeing a lion feels good when the alternative is worse. We seek evidence of threats to feel safe, and we get a dopamine boost when we find what we seek. You can also get a serotonin boost from the feeling of being right, and an oxytocin boost from bonding with those who sense the same threat. This is why people seem oddly pleased to find evidence of doom and gloom. But the pleasure doesn’t last because the “do something” feeling commands your attention again. You can end up feeling bad a lot even if you’re successful in your survival efforts.
”
”
Loretta Graziano Breuning (Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels)
“
For pleasure, I have to turn to the vivid memory of tastes and smells, an inexhaustible reservoir of sensations. Once, I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories. You can sit down to a meal at any hour, with no fuss or ceremony. If it’s a restaurant, no need to call ahead. If I do the cooking, it is always a success. The bœuf bourguignon is tender, the bœuf en gelée translucent, the apricot pie possesses just the requisite tartness.
”
”
Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
“
A certain kind of magic is born when the curtain rises. Intoxicated by the smell of the greasepaint and powered by the glow of the footlights, lovers successfully elope, villains get their just deserts and people die in epic stunts and yet live to tell the tale. Thousands pay to sit and be fooled by illusions and still jump to their feet to applaud despite their gullibility. It's an inexplicable, delicious, addictive power that keeps people entranced and coming back for more, again and again.
”
”
Carrie Hope Fletcher (When the Curtain Falls)
“
Reviewing our experiences, we had become more and more convinced that carrying arms was not only unnecessary in most grizzly country but was certainly no good for the desired atmosphere and proper protocol in obtaining good film records. If we were to obtain such film and fraternize successfully with the big bears, it would be better to go unarmed in most places. The mere fact of having a gun within reach, cached somewhere in a pack or a hidden holster, causes a man to act with unconscious arrogance and thus maybe to smell different or to transmit some kind of signal objectionable to bears. The armed man does not assume his proper role in association with the wild ones, a fact of which they seem instantly aware at some distance. He, being wilder than they, whether he likes to admit it or not, is instantly under even more suspicion than he would encounter if unarmed. One must follow the role of an uninvited visitor—an intruder—rather than that of an aggressive hunter, and one should go unarmed to insure this attitude.
”
”
John McPhee (Coming into the Country)
“
I who am blind can give one hint to those who see-one admonition to those who would make full use of the gift of sight: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to the other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object you want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again."
-Helen Keller
”
”
Karl Albrecht (Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success)
“
You are impossible, a paradox, a collection at odds.
You are everything to everyone.
The son they never had.
The friend they always wanted.
A generous stranger.
A successful son.
A perfect gentleman.
A perfect partner.
A perfect ...
Perfect ...
(Drink.)
They love your body.
Your abs.
Your laugh.
The way you smell.
They want you.
(Not you.)
They love you.
(Not you.)
You are whoever they want you to be.
You are more than enough, because you are not real.
You are perfect, because you don't exist.
(Not you.)
(Never you.)
They look at you and see whatever they want ...
Because they don't see you at all.
”
”
Victoria Schwab
“
Women prefer the smell of moderately related over unrelated men. And in a study of 160 years of data concerning every couple in Iceland (which is a mecca for human geneticists, given its genetic and socioeconomic homogeneity), the highest reproductive success arose from third- and fourth-cousin marriages.
”
”
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
“
Why," he was saying, "why should one not tolerate this life, since so little suffices to deprive one of it? So little brings it into being, so little brightens it, so little blights it, so little bears it away. Otherwise, who would tolerate the blows of fate and the humiliations of a successful career, the swindling of grocers, the prices of butchers, the water of milkmen, the irritation of parents, the fury of teachers, the bawling of sergeant-majors, the turpitude of the beasts, the lamentations of the dead-beats, the silence of infinite space, the smell of cauliflower or the passivity of the wooden horses on a merry-g0-round, were it not for his knowledge that the bad and proliferative behaviour of certain minute cells (gesture) or the trajectory of a bullet traced by an involuntary, irresponsible, anonymous individual might unexpectedly come and cause all these cares to evaporate into the blue heavens.
”
”
Raymond Queneau (Zazie in the Metro)
“
Gone as usual in the morning, and me left behind and naked, inner thighs lightly scaled with the dried spoor of our lovemaking: she liked to stay on top afterward and let the juice run down, and I liked whatever she liked. Imagining in the shower that I could smell her still, the angular scent of those secret bones, had she always smelled so fierce and so good? Recalling those gone times, old memories lit by the fire of the new, I did not this time wonder how long it would last; I was too smart for that now. Take what you get, and don’t think. Of course it could never be that easy, but there were moments, like now, that I could successfully pretend that it was, and I had no inclination to try to peer past those moments. I’m not one who wants to know the future: at the best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well. Who really wants to find out how tight the sling is, for your own very personal ass, who wants to know how deep the shit will really be? Not you. Not me either. Because it’s rarely bliss saved up, is it, when you finally get there. I’ll take my now, waking with a lover’s scent on me, around me, take my hopes before they’re maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.
”
”
Kathe Koja (The Cipher)
“
Mistakes are excuses of doing something and being apologetically right for doing it. Excuses are deceptions of not doing something and finding reasons for not doing it.
Deceptions are blindfolds that lead you to what you can sense and smell but cannot see. Don't make mistakes of creating deceptive excuses about your success.
Be In It To Win It.
”
”
Goitsemang Sandra Mvula
“
As I often say, “Sales is a verb.” The dictionary would argue otherwise, but experience shows that the most successful new business salespeople tend to be the most active salespeople. Good things happen when a talented salesperson with a potential solution gets in front of a prospective customer who looks and smells a lot like your other customers.
”
”
Mike Weinberg (New Sales. Simplified.: The Essential Handbook for Prospecting and New Business Development)
“
Speaking to a foreigner was the dream of every student, and my opportunity came at last. When I got back from my trip down the Yangtze, I learned that my year was being sent in October to a port in the south called Zhanjiang to practice our English with foreign sailors. I was thrilled.
Zhanjiang was about 75 miles from Chengdu, a journey of two days and two nights by rail. It was the southernmost large port in China, and quite near the Vietnamese border.
It felt like a foreign country, with turn-of-the-century colonial-style buildings, pastiche Romanesque arches, rose windows, and large verandas with colorful parasols. The local people spoke Cantonese, which was almost a foreign language. The air smelled of the unfamiliar sea, exotic tropical vegetation, and an altogether bigger world.
But my excitement at being there was constantly doused by frustration. We were accompanied by a political supervisor and three lecturers, who decided that, although we were staying only a mile from the sea, we were not to be allowed anywhere near it. The harbor itself was closed to outsiders, for fear of 'sabotage' or defection. We were told that a student from Guangzhou had managed to stow away once in a cargo steamer, not realizing that the hold would be sealed for weeks, by which time he had perished. We had to restrict our movements to a clearly defined area of a few blocks around our residence.
Regulations like these were part of our daily life, but they never failed to infuriate me. One day I was seized by an absolute compulsion to get out. I faked illness and got permission to go to a hospital in the middle of the city. I wandered the streets desperately trying to spot the sea, without success. The local people were unhelpful: they did not like non-Cantonese speakers, and refused to understand me. We stayed in the port for three weeks, and only once were we allowed, as a special treat, to go to an island to see the ocean.
As the point of being there was to talk to the sailors, we were organized into small groups to take turns working in the two places they were allowed to frequent: the Friendship Store, which sold goods for hard currency, and the Sailors' Club, which had a bar, a restaurant, a billiards room, and a ping-pong room.
There were strict rules about how we could talk to the sailors. We were not allowed to speak to them alone, except for brief exchanges over the counter of the Friendship Store. If we were asked our names and addresses, under no circumstances were we to give our real ones. We all prepared a false name and a nonexistent address. After every conversation, we had to write a detailed report of what had been said which was standard practice for anyone who had contact with foreigners. We were warned over and over again about the importance of observing 'discipline in foreign contacts' (she waifi-lu). Otherwise, we were told, not only would we get into serious trouble, other students would be banned from coming.
”
”
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
“
I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelled like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realised that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.
”
”
Eve Babitz
“
I cannot ignore this murderous self: it is there. I smell it and feel it. . . . When it says: you shall not sleep, you cannot teach, I shall go on anyway, knocking its nose in. Its biggest weapon is and has been the image of myself as a perfect success: in writing, teaching and living. . . . My demon of negation will tempt me day by day, and I’ll fight it, as something other than my essential self, which I am fighting to save.20
”
”
Sue Monk Kidd (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine)
“
Perhaps success in the future will depend partly on our ability to generate cheap power, but I think it will depend to a greater extent on our ability to resist a technological formula that is sterile: peas without pageantry, corn without coon, knowledge without wisdom, kitchens without a warm stove. There is more to these rocks than uranium; there is the lichen on the rock, the smell of the fern whose feet are upon the rock, the view from the rock.
”
”
E.B. White (Essays of E.B. White)
“
Perhaps success in the future will depend partly on our ability to generate cheap power, but I think it will depend to a greater extent on our ability to resist a technological formula that is sterile: peas without pageantry, corn without coon, knowledge without wisdom, kitchens without a warm stove. There is more to these rocks than uranium; there is the lichen on the rock, the smell of the fern whose feet are upon the rock, the view from the rock. Last
”
”
E.B. White (Essays of E. B. White)
“
At some point, economists must study the Business Family Wedding Gift Economy. It is an extraordinary, closed bubble. What happens is this: a woman marries into a conservative Indian business family. She may well be energetic and bright, but there’s no place for her at work, nor can she work elsewhere. So, instead, she’s urged to ‘take up something’. Scented candles, usually. Sometimes kurta design. Or necklaces, or faux-Rajasthani coffee tables. She then becomes a ‘success’, because every other woman in the family buys her candles as wedding presents, at hideously inflated prices. In return, she buys their kurtas as wedding presents. Eventually, everyone is buying everyone else’s hideous creations at hideously high prices, and nobody can ever tell anyone else their stuff sucks, and that nobody really likes the smell of lavender anyway. The most amazing thing is, this is not a very different economy from the one their husbands are in.
”
”
Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
“
Seeing this did more for Jo than the wisest sermons, the saintliest hymns, the most fervent prayers that any voice could utter. For with eyes made clear by many tears, and a heart softened by the tenderest sorrow, she recognized the beauty of her sister's life––uneventful, unambitious, yet full of the genuine virtues which 'smell sweet, and blossom in the dust', the self–forgetfulness that makes the humblest on earth remembered soonest in heaven, the true success which is possible to all.
”
”
Louisa May Alcott
“
Coriolanus acted engrossed in the show as 8, 6, and 11 called their tributes, but his brain spun with the repercussions of landing Lucy Gray Baird. She was a gift, he knew it, and he must treat her as such. But how best to exploit her showstopping entrance? How to wrangle some success from a dress, a snake, a song? The tributes would be given precious little time with the audience before the Games began. How could he get the audience to invest in her and, by extension, him, in just an interview? He half registered the other tributes, mostly pitiful creatures, and took note of the stronger ones. Sejanus got a towering fellow from District 2, and Livia’s District 1 boy looked like he could be a contender as well. Coriolanus’s girl seemed fairly healthy, but her slight build was more suited to dancing than hand-to-hand combat. He bet she could run fast enough, though, and that was important. As the reaping drew to a close, the smell of food from the buffet wafted over the audience
”
”
Suzanne Collins (The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0))
“
Miss Lucinda Throckmorton-Jones, former paid companion to several of the ton’s most successful debutantes of prior seasons, came to Havenhurst to fill the position of Elizabeth’s duenna. A woman of fifty with wiry gray hair she scraped back into a bun and the posture of a ramrod, she had a permanently pinched face, as if she smelled something disagreeable but was too well-bred to remark upon it. In addition to the duenna’s daunting physical appearance, Elizabeth observed shortly after their first meeting that Miss Throckmorton-Jones possessed an astonishing ability to sit serenely for hours without twitching so much as a finger.
Elizabeth refused to be put off by her stony demeanor and set about finding a way to thaw her. Teasingly, she called her “Lucy,” and when the casually affectionate nickname won a thunderous frown from the lady, Elizabeth tried to find a different means. She discovered it very soon: A few days after Lucinda came to live at Havenhurst the duenna discovered her curled up in a chair in Havenhurt’s huge library, engrossed in a book. “You enjoy reading?” Lucinda had said gruffly-and with surprise-as she noted the gold embossed title on the volume.
“Yes,” Elizabeth had assured her, smiling. “Do you?”
“Have you read Christopher Marlowe?”
“Yes, but I prefer Shakespeare.”
Thereafter it became their policy each night after supper to debate the merits of the individual books they’d read. Before long Elizabeth realized that she’d won the duenna’s reluctant respect. It was impossible to be certain she’d won Lucinda’s affection, for the only emotion the lady ever displayed was anger, and that only once, at a miscreant tradesman in the village. Even so, it was a display Elizabeth never forgot. Wielding her ever-present umbrella, Lucinda had advanced on the hapless man, backing him clear around his own shop, while from her lips in a icy voice poured the most amazing torrent of eloquent, biting fury Elizabeth had ever heard.
“My temper,” Lucinda had primly informed her-by way of apology, Elizabeth supposed-“is my only shortcoming.”
Privately, Elizabeth thought Lucy must bottle up all her emotions inside herself as she sat perfectly still on sofas and chairs, for years at a time, until it finally exploded like one of those mountains she’d read about that poured forth molten rock when the pressure finally reached a peak.
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
The overwhelming majority of combat veterans whom I have known are painfully aware of the absence of intimacy, tenderness, light playfulness, or easy mutuality in their sex lives. For many, sex is a trigger of intrusive recollection and emotion from Vietnam as the sound of explosions or the smell of a corpse. Sex and anger are intertwined that they often cannot conceive of tender, uncoerced sex that is free of rage. When successful treatment reduces their rage, they sometimes report that they have to completely relearn (or learn for the first time) the pleasures of sex with intimacy and playfulness.
”
”
Jonathan Shay (Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character)
“
You lie there, not even thinking really, except to try to consider how to describe the hurt, as if finding the language for it might bring it up out of you. If you can make something real, if you can see it and smell it and touch it, then you can kill it.
You think, it's like a brain fire. Like a rodent gnawing at you from the inside. A knife in your gut. A spiral. Whirlpool. Black hole.
The words used to describe it - despair, fear, anxiety, obsession - do so little to communicate it. Maybe we needed to give shape to the opaque, deep-down pain that evades both sense and senses.
For a moment, you think you're better. You've just had a successful train of thought, with an engine and a caboose and everything. Your thoughts. Authored by you. And then you feel a wave of nausea, a fist clenching from within your rib cage, cold sweat hot forehead
”
”
John Green (Turtles All the Way Down)
“
Elwood had never been much of a crier, but he’d taken it up since the arrest. The tears came at night, when he imagined what Nickel held in store for him. When he heard his grandmother sobbing in her room next door, fussing around, opening and closing things because she didn’t know what to do with her hands. When he tried without success to figure out why his life had bent to this wretched avenue. He knew he couldn’t let the boys see him weep, so he turned over in the bunk and put his pillow over his head and listened to the voices: the jokes and taunts, the stories of home and distant cronies, the juvenile conjectures about how the world worked and their naïve plans to outwit it. He’d started the day in his old life and ended it here. The pillowcase smelled like vinegar, and in the night the katydids and crickets screeched in waves, soft then loud, back and forth.
”
”
Colson Whitehead (The Nickel Boys)
“
The inhibition of behavior provoked by cat odor is remarkably powerful and long-lasting. As summarized in Figure 1.1, following a single exposure to cat odor, animals continued to exhibit inhibition of play for up to five successive days. Our interpretation of this effect is that some unconditioned attribute of cat smell can innately arouse a fear system in the rat brain, and this emotional state becomes rapidly associated with the contextual cues of the chamber. On subsequent occasions, one does not need the unconditioned fear stimulus—the feline smell—to evoke anxiety. The contextual cues of the chamber suffice. This, in essence, is classical or Pavlovian conditioning. The flow of associations is outlined more formally in Figure 1.2, and as we will see, classical conditioning is still one of the most powerful and effective ways to study emotional learning in the laboratory.
”
”
Jaak Panksepp (Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Series in Affective Science))
“
The theme of the women's movement is female is beautiful, female is lovable; its agenda is for us to love ourselves as women, to deeply honor and respect ourselves and all women; not just women we agree with, not just other Lesbians or other heterosexual women, not just white or brown or black women, not just poor or working-class or middle-class or upper-class women, not just “well-adjusted” women, or healthy women, or women who smell good and brush their teeth regularly, or women who have accepted Jesus as their savior, or women who worship the Goddess. All women. And not just to like them, not just to find them non-disgusting, tolerable, okay. But to love them—completely, passionately, madly. To be full of compassion for one another, to be slow to take offense and quick to forgive. To conquer in ourselves the fierce pangs of competition and jealousy, and to rejoice genuinely in one another's success.
”
”
Sonia Johnson (Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation)
“
Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable.
Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow.
And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness.
The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.
”
”
Ashim Shanker (Don't Forget to Breathe (Migrations, Volume I))
“
It was a sordid scene. Philip leaned over the rail, staring down, and he ceased to hear the music. They danced furiously. They danced round the room, slowly, talking very little, with all their attention given to the dance. The room was hot, and their faces shone with sweat. It seemed to Philip that they had thrown off the guard which people wear on their expression, the homage to convention, and he saw them now as they really were. In that moment of abandon they were strangely animal: some were foxy and some were wolflike; and others had the long, foolish face of sheep. Their skins were sallow from the unhealthy life the led and the poor food they ate. Their features were blunted by mean interests, and their little eyes were shifty and cunning. There was nothing of nobility in their bearing, and you felt that for all of them life was a long succession of petty concerns and sordid thoughts. The air was heavy with the musty smell of humanity. But they danced furiously as though impelled by some strange power within them, and it seemed to Philip that they were driven forward by a rage for enjoyment. They were seeking desperately to escape from a world of horror. The desire for pleasure which Cronshaw said was the only motive of human action urged them blindly on, and the very vehemence of the desire seemed to rob it of all pleasure. The were hurried on by a great wind, helplessly, they knew not why and they knew not whither. Fate seemed to tower above them, and they danced as though everlasting darkness were beneath their feet. Their silence was vaguely alarming. It was as if life terrified them and robbed them of power of speech so that the shriek which was in their hearts died at their throats. Their eyes were haggard and grim; and notwithstanding the beastly lust that disfigured them, and the meanness of their faces, and the cruelty, notwithstanding the stupidness which was the worst of all, the anguish of those fixed eyes made all that crowd terrible and pathetic. Philip loathed them, and yet his heart ached with the infinite pity which filled him.
He took his coat from the cloak-room and went out into the bitter coldness of the night.
”
”
W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)
“
They need you.
(Not you.)
They love you.
(Not you.)
You are whoever they want you to be.
You are more than enough, because you are not real.
You are perfect, because you don't exist.
(Not you.)
(Never you.)
They look at you and see whatever they want .
Because they don't see you at all.
Take a drink every time you hear a lie.
You're a great cook.
(They say as you burn toast.)
You're so funny.
(You've never told a joke.)
You're so
. handsome.
ambitious.
successful.
strong
(Are you drinking yet?)
You're so ..
charming.
clever.
Sexy.
(Drink.)
So confident.
So shy.
So mysterious.
So open.
You are impossible, a paradox, a collection at odds.
You are everything to everyone.
The son they never had.
The friend they always wanted.
A generous stranger.
A successful son.
A perfect gentleman.
A perfect partner.
A perfect
Perfect.
(Drink.)
They love your body.
Your abs.
Your laugh.
The way you smell.
The sound of your voice.
They want you.
(Not you.)
They need you.
(Not you.)
They love you.
(Not you.)
You are whoever they want you to be.
You are more than enough, because you are not real.
You are perfect, because you don't exist.
(Not you.)
(Never you.)
They look at you and see whatever they want.
Because they don't see you at all.
”
”
Victoria Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue)
“
Below us was a frozen lake. It was perfectly round, a great gleaming eye in which the moon and stars were mirrored. Lanterns glowing the same cold white as the aurora dangled from the lake's edge to a scattering of benches and merchant-stands, draped in bright awnings of opal and blue. Delicious smells floated on the wind---smoked fish; fire-roasted nuts and candies; spiced cakes. A winter fair.*
* Outside of Russia, almost all known species of courtly fae, and many common fae also, are fond of fairs and markets; indeed, such gatherings appear in stories as the interstitial spaces between their worlds and ours, and thus it is not particularly surprising that they feature in so many encounters with the Folk. The character of such markets, however, varies widely, from sinister to benign. The following features are universal: 1) Dancing, which the mortal visitor may be invited to partake in; 2) A variety of vendors selling foods and goods which the visitor is unable to recall afterwards. More often than not, the markets take place at night. Numerous scholars have attempted to document these gatherings; the most widely referenced accounts are by Baltasar Lenz, who successfully visited two fairs in Bavaria before his disappearance in 1899.
”
”
Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1))
“
I’m here to horrify you,” he said. And then, because he couldn’t bear it any longer, he reached out and pulled her to him. She was warm and soft in his arms, and she smelled so deliciously right. He could have inhaled her scent for hours.
“Hugo—”
He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to answer any questions. He didn’t know who he was or what he wanted or what dreams would come to fill his heart. He only knew that if he couldn’t have her, nothing would ever be right again. And so he kissed her. He tasted her, sweet and steady against him, put his hand in the small of her back and drew her toward him.
She kissed him back.
“I love you,” he said. The truth took root inside him. For the first time in years, the dark words of his past receded.
“But, Hugo…”
He set his fingers over her lips. “Let me do this,” he said. “I thought I had to prove myself with money and accomplishments. But those will always ring hollow. They will never be enough. I want to be somebody. Let me be your husband. Let me be the father of your child—of all your children. I got more satisfaction from striking Clermont than I did from any success I found in business.”
She pulled back from him. “You struck Clermont?”
“Twice. And—that reminds me—I blackmailed him into promising to send your child to Eton.” Hugo tightened his grip around her. “I’ve never pretended to be a good man, you know. It’s just that…I’m yours.” He leaned his head against hers.
Her breath was warm against his face. “Did you hit him hard?”
“I’m afraid I did.”
“That’s my Hugo.” There was a grim satisfaction in her voice. “I love you, you know. If you hadn’t come, as soon as winter set in and the ground became too hard to work, I’d planned to come for you.”
“Well, I’m glad I came to my senses,” Hugo said. “You shouldn’t have traveled, not in your condition. Yet curiosity impels me to inquire. What did you plan to do, once you arrived?”
“Allow me to demonstrate.” She lifted her face to his, traced the line of his jaw with her fingers. “This.” She pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “And this.” She kissed the other corner. “And…” She took his mouth full on, her lips soft against his, tasting of all the things he’d most wanted.
“I’d do that,” she whispered, “until you were forced to admit you loved me.”
“I love you.”
“Well, that’s no fun.” She kissed him again. “Now what excuse do I have?”
He drew in a shuddering breath and pulled her closer. “You could make me say it again,” he whispered. “Make me say it always. Make me say it so often that you never have cause to doubt. I love you.
”
”
Courtney Milan
“
standstill in one of the stations which came before Balbec-Plage, stations the mere names of which (Incarville, Marcouville, Doville, Pont-a-Couleuvre, Arambouville, Saint-Mars-le-Vieux, Hermonville, Maineville) seemed to me outlandish, whereas if I had come upon them in a book I should at once have been struck by their affinity to the names of certain places in the neighbourhood of Combray. But to the trained ear two musical airs, consisting each of so many notes, several of which are common to them both, will present no similarity whatever if they differ in the colour of their harmony and orchestration. So it was that nothing could have reminded me less than these dreary names, made up of sand, of space too airy and empty and of salt, out of which the termination ‘ville’ always escaped, as the ‘fly’ seems to spring out from the end of the word ‘butterfly’—nothing could have reminded me less of those other names, Roussainville or Martinville, which, because I had heard them pronounced so often by my great-aunt at table, in the dining-room, had acquired a certain sombre charm in which were blended perhaps extracts of the flavour of ‘preserves,’ the smell of the fire of logs and of the pages of one of Bergotte’s books, the colour of the stony front of the house opposite, all of which things still to-day when they rise like a gaseous bubble from the depths of my memory preserve their own specific virtue through all the successive layers of rival interests which must be traversed before they reach the surface
”
”
Marcel Proust (In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes) (ShandonPress))
“
Once people believed her careful documentation, there was an easy answer—since babies are cute and inhibit aggression, something pathological must be happening. Maybe the Abu langur population density was too high and everyone was starving, or male aggression was overflowing, or infanticidal males were zombies. Something certifiably abnormal.
Hrdy eliminated these explanations and showed a telling pattern to the infanticide. Female langurs live in groups with a single resident breeding male. Elsewhere are all-male groups that intermittently drive out the resident male; after infighting, one male then drives out the rest. Here’s his new domain, consisting of females with the babies of the previous male. And crucially, the average tenure of a breeding male (about twenty-seven months) is shorter than the average interbirth interval. No females are ovulating, because they’re nursing infants; thus this new stud will be booted out himself before any females wean their kids and resume ovulating. All for nothing, none of his genes passed on.
What, logically, should he do? Kill the infants. This decreases the reproductive success of the previous male and, thanks to the females ceasing to nurse, they start ovulating.
That’s the male perspective. What about the females? They’re also into maximizing copies of genes passed on. They fight the new male, protecting their infants. Females have also evolved the strategy of going into “pseudoestrus”—falsely appearing to be in heat. They mate with the male. And since males know squat about female langur biology, they fall for it—“Hey, I mated with her this morning and now she’s got an infant; I am one major stud.” They’ll often cease their infanticidal attacks.
Despite initial skepticism, competitive infanticide has been documented in similar circumstances in 119 species, including lions, hippos, and chimps.
A variant occurs in hamsters; because males are nomadic, any infant a male encounters is unlikely to be his, and thus he attempts to kill it (remember that rule about never putting a pet male hamster in a cage with babies?). Another version occurs among wild horses and gelada baboons; a new male harasses pregnant females into miscarrying. Or suppose you’re a pregnant mouse and a new, infanticidal male has arrived. Once you give birth, your infants will be killed, wasting all the energy of pregnancy. Logical response? Cut your losses with the “Bruce effect,” where pregnant females miscarry if they smell a new male.
Thus competitive infanticide occurs in numerous species (including among female chimps, who sometimes kill infants of unrelated females). None of this makes sense outside of gene-based individual selection.
Individual selection is shown with heartbreaking clarity by mountain gorillas, my favorite primate. They’re highly endangered, hanging on in pockets of high-altitude rain forest on the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There are only about a thousand gorillas left, because of habitat degradation, disease caught from nearby humans, poaching, and spasms of warfare rolling across those borders. And also because mountain gorillas practice competitive infanticide. Logical for an individual intent on maximizing the copies of his genes in the next generation, but simultaneously pushing these wondrous animals toward extinction. This isn’t behaving for the good of the species.
”
”
Robert M. Sapolsky
“
If we consider the possibility that all women–from the infant suckling her mother’s breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother’s milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women–exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of woman-identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of eight- or nine-year-olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who “shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates … in cheap subdivided houses in the artisans’ area of town,” who “practiced Christian virtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associating with men,” who earned their livings as spinners, bakers, nurses, or ran schools for young girls, and who managed–until the Church forced them to disperse–to live independent both of marriage and of conventual restrictions. It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated “Lesbians” of the women’s school around Sappho of the seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resistance sisterhoods–communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands–the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women’s strikes in the silk mills. It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius, with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel father’s house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon. Hurston married twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of white patronage and poverty, professional success and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters, committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as “apolitical ”. Both were drawn to men of intellectual quality; for both of them women provided the ongoing fascination and sustenance of life.
”
”
Adrienne Rich (Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence)
“
Irony in postwar art and culture started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive—a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: it was assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom. So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” 32 This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300 page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed. Think, for a moment, of Third World rebels and coups. Third World rebels are great at exposing and overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes, but they seem noticeably less great at the mundane, non-negative task of then establishing a superior governing alternative. Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough, cynical rebel-skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves—in other words, they just become better tyrants. And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.” Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments)
“
When we are sold perfume, we are accustomed to also being sold the idea of a life we will never have.
Coty's Chypre enabled Guerlain to create Mitsouko; Coty's Emeraude of 1921 was the bedrock on which Shalimar was built and Coty's L'Origan become the godmother of L'heure bleue, also by Guerlain.
Some people dedicate themselves to making life beautiful. With instinctual good taste, magpie tendencies and a flair for color, they weave painfully exquisite tableaux, defining the look of an era. Paul Poiret was one such person. After his success, he went bust in 1929 and had to sell his leftover clothing stock as rags. Swept out of the picture by a new generation of designers, his style too ornate and Aladdinesque, Poiret ended his days as a street painter and died in poverty.
It was Poiret who saw that symbolic nomenclature could turn us into frenzied followers, transforming our desire to own a perfume into desperation.
The beauty industry has always been brilliant at turning insecurities into commercial opportunities.
Readers could buy the cologne to relax during times of anxiety or revive themselves from strain.
Particularly in the 1930s, releases came thick and fast, intended to give the impression of bounty, the provision of beauty to all women in the nation. Giving perfumes as a gift even came under the Soviet definition of kulturnost or "cultured behavior", including to aunts and teachers on International Women's Day.
Mitsouko is a heartening scent to war when alone or rather, when not wanting to feel lonely.
Using fragrance as part of a considered daily ritual, the territorial marking of our possessions and because it offers us a retrospective sense of naughtiness.
You can never tell who is going to be a Nr. 5 wearer. No. 5 has the precision of well-cut clothes and that special appeal which comes from a clean, bare room free of the knick-knacks that would otherwise give away its age. Its versatility may well be connected to its abstraction.
Gardenia perfumes are not usually the more esoteric or intellectual on the shelves but exist for those times when we demand simply to smell gorgeous.
You can depend on the perfume industry to make light of the world's woes. No matter how bad things get, few obstacles can block the shimmer and glitz of a new fragrance.
Perfume became so fashionable as a means of reinvention and recovery that the neurology department at Columbia University experimented with the administration of jasmine and tuberose perfumes, in conjunction with symphony music, to treat anxiety, hysteria and nightmares.
Scent enthusiasts cared less for the nuances of a composition and more for the impact a scent would have in society.
In Ancient Rome, the Stoics were concerned about the use of fragrance by women as a mask for seducing men or as a vehicle of deception. The Roman satirist Juvenal talked of women buying scent with adultery in mind and such fears were still around in the 1940s and they are here with us today. Similarly, in crime fiction, fragrance is often the thing that gives the perpetrator away. Specifically in film noir, scent gets associated with misdemeanors.
With Opium, the drugs tag was simply the bait. What YSL was really marketing, with some genius, was perfume as me time: a daily opportunity to get languid and to care sod-all about anything or anyone else.
”
”
Lizzie Ostrom (Perfume: A Century of Scents)
“
The Country Ambassador versus the Country Manager Some companies experiment with an interesting profile: a country chairperson who is a weak overlay over the business and largely plays an ambassadorial role. However, statesmanship and ambassadors are best left to the realm of diplomacy. These roles are a legacy of an era that no longer exists. GE tried the model over the past decade with limited success and finally abandoned it. A ceremonial role, with no accountability for the business and the responsibility only for engaging government, industry associations, and other CEOs, is usually not effective. Everyone—employees, customers, business partners, government officials—will quickly see this role for what it is and dismiss the person as lightweight. This does disservice to the incumbent and the role. The ambassadorial country manager who smells opportunity, but is powerless to act, can become intensely frustrated. Increasingly, the connections among strategy and execution, business, reputation, and regulation are tightening, so an artificial separation of these functions is suboptimal. Bringing accountability for these together in a single leader is vital for growing competent and well-rounded business leaders, who are capable of even being the CEO someday. If the business does require wise counsel, access, and influence and a senior public face, a strong advisory board headed by an iconic leader who serves as a nonexecutive chairperson may be a more prudent approach. We followed this model at Microsoft India with considerable success; the approach is gaining popularity at companies like Coca-Cola, Schneider Electric, and JCB.
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Ravi Venkatesan (Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere)
“
Where one thing is sure, there is less opportunity to get a SECOND CHANCES so never miss the first one.
Whatever the ambition is, it should be keep it as secret, because the secret of success is CONSTANCY to Purpose Not PURPOSE to constancy.
Never show your popularity to the people's those who underestimate you.
In_Relationships - If it is true then remember the PURPOSE of Beginning.
In_Love - Never expect it return back. because business is something apart from LOVE.
In_Bad - Never make any Mistakes with an EVIDENCE.
In_Life - Don't stand in SAME place for long time, Because last trashcans make you smell BAD.
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Gnanavel Rajendran
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One of the essential traits of the successful “vulture” value investor is instinct. One needs not just to smell the lion’s carcass from afar but to be able to imagine that the bees may have made honey inside it.
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Christopher Risso-gill (There's Always Something to Do: The Peter Cundill Investment Approach)
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A camomile rinse is excellent for blond hair. Use three or four tablespoons of dried flowers to a pint of water. Boil twenty to thirty minutes, straining when cool. Shampoo the hair before using, since it must be free of oil. Pour rinse over the hair several times and do not rinse with clear water after using. It will leave the hair smelling like sweet clover.
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Louise Riotte (Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening)
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If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. —FREDERICK BUECHNER
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Arianna Huffington (Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder)
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first BJP chief minister of Gujarat at a function in Gandhinagar. Again, Modi wasn’t the focus, but already the whispers in party circles projected him as the ‘super-chief minister’. The sweet smell of success, though, would quickly evaporate. The Sangh Parivar in Gujarat
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Rajdeep Sardesai (2014: The Election That Changed India)
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The textbook was born from analyzing actual movements, but these were still the exaggerated gestures of Europeans and Americans They portrayed ‘Western (bata-kusai; lit., smelling of butter)’ movements, like the way some Japanese who have lived abroad will spread their arms and shake their head when they say ‘Oh no!
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Ian Condry (The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story)
“
It is easy to put down Frances Trollope as a Tory embittered by her American business failure. But her observations on American manners, confirmed by many other observers foreign and domestic, actually provide a sharply drawn picture of daily life in the young republic. Most observers at the time agreed with her in finding Americans obsessively preoccupied with earning a living and relatively uninterested in leisure activities. Not only Tories but reformers like Martineau and Charles Dickens angered their hosts by complaining of the overwhelmingly commercial tone of American life, the worship of the 'almighty dollar.' Americans pursued success so avidly they seldom paused to smell the flowers. A kind of raw egotism, unsoftened by sociability, expressed itself in boastful men, demanding women, and loud children. The amiable arts of conversation and cooking were not well cultivated, foreigners complained; Tocqueville found American cuisine 'the infancy of the art' and declared one New York dinner he attended 'complete barbarism.' Despite their relatively broad distribution of prosperity, Americans seemed strangely restless; visitors interpreted the popularity of the rocking chair as one symptom of this restlessness. Another symptom, even more emphatically deplored, was the habit, widespread among males, of chewing tobacco and spitting on the floor. Women found their long dresses caught the spittle, which encouraged them to avoid male company at social events. Chewing tobacco thus reinforced the tendency toward social segregation of the sexes, with each gender talking among themselves about their occupations, the men, business and politics; the women, homemaking and children.
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Daniel Walker Howe (What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 - 1848)
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The globally acclaimed author of Fully Human, Fully Alive: A New Life through a New Vision, John Powell, estimates that an average person taps only 10 percent of his potential, sees only 10 percent of the beauty that is all around him, hears only 10 percent of its music and poetry, smells only 10 percent of its fragrance, and tastes only 10 percent of the deliciousness of being alive.
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Jack Canfield (Coaching for Breakthrough Success: Proven Techniques for Making Impossible Dreams Possible DIGITAL AUDIO)
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According to the University of California Center for Mindfulness, mindfulness is a quality that is innate in people yet most people do not know that they have and can cultivate it. Mindfulness is actually the awareness that is not thinking, but which is aware of the other senses, including seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, and feeling.
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Aidin Safavi (Positive Affirmations: for Beginners - Affirmations for Success - Affirmations 101 - Negative Self-Talk Destroyed (Positive affirmations for a Better Life ... to Get rid of Negative Self Talk Book 1))
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your ears and put them over your mouth,” Butcher says. “Learn to listen, see, smell, and absorb everything around you without speaking your thoughts first. If
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Kate White (I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know)
“
Todd the manager was at her cubicle the moment her chair squeaked.
“How you doin’, Jane?” he asked in his oft-affected pseudo-Sopranos accent.
“Fine.”
She stared. He had a new haircut. His white blond hair was now spiked with an incredible amount of pomade that smelled of raspberries, a do that could only be carried off with true success by a fifteen-year-old boy wielding an impressive and permanent glare. Todd was grinning. And forty-three. Jane wondered if politeness required her to offer a compliment on something glaringly obvious.
“Uh…you, your hair is different.”
“Hey, girls always notice the hair. Right? Isn’t that basically right?”
“I guess I just proved it,” she said sadly.
“Super. Hey, listen,” he sat on the edge of her desk, “we’ve got a last-minute addition that needs special attention. It may seem like your basic stock photo array, but don’t be fooled! This is for the all-important page sixteen layout. I’d give this one to your basic interns, but I’m choosing you because I think you’d do a super job. What d’you say?”
“Sure thing, Todd.”
“Su-per.” He gave her two thumbs-up and held them there, smiling, his eyes unblinking. After a few moments, Jane cringed. What did he want her to do? Was she supposed to high-five his thumbs? Touch thumb-pad to thumb-pad? Or did he just leave them there so long for emphasis?
The silence quivered. At last Jane opted for raising her own thumbs in a mirror of the Todd salute.
“All right, my lady Jane.” He nodded, still with the thumbs up, and kept them up as he walked away. At least he hadn’t asked her out again. Why was it that when she was aching for a man, everyone was married, but when she was giving them up, so many men were so awkwardly single?
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Shannon Hale (Austenland (Austenland, #1))
“
I knew the Tam were already a success by the greeting I got. The women in their canoes in the middle of the lake called out loud hellos that I heard over my engine, and a few men and children came down to the beach and gave me big floppy Tam waves. A noticeable shift from the chary welcome we’d received six weeks earlier. I cut the engine and several men came and pulled the boat to shore, and without my having to say a word two swaybacked young lads with something that looked like red berries woven in their curled hair led me up a path and down a road, past a spirit house with an enormous carved face over the entryway—a lean and angry fellow with three thick bones through his nose and a wide open mouth with many sharp teeth and a snake’s head for a tongue. It was much more skilled than the Kiona’s rudimentary depictions, the lines cleaner, the colors—red, black, green, and white—far more vivid and glossy, as if the paint were still wet. We passed several of these ceremonial houses and from the doorways men called down to my guides and they called back. They took me in one direction then, as if I wouldn’t notice, turned me around and doubled back down the same road past the same houses, the lake once again in full view. Just when I thought their only plan was to parade me round town all day, they turned a corner and stopped before a large house, freshly built, with a sort of portico in front and blue-and-white cloth curtains hanging in the windows and doorway. I laughed out loud at this English tea shop encircled by pampas grass in the middle of the Territories. A few pigs were digging around the base of the ladder. From below I heard footsteps creaking the new floor. The cloth at the windows and doors puffed in and out from the movement within. ‘Hallo the house!’ I’d heard this in an American frontier film once. I waited for someone to emerge but no one did, so I climbed up and stood on the narrow porch and knocked on one of the posts. The sound was absorbed by the voices inside, quiet, nearly whispery, but insistent, like the drone of a circling aeroplane. I stepped closer and pulled the curtain aside a few inches. I was struck first by the heat, then the smell. There were at least thirty Tam in the front room, on the floor or perched oddly on chairs, in little groups or even alone, everyone with a project in front of them. Many were children and adolescents, but
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Lily King (Euphoria)
“
The scent of success, it smells like body odor.
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Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
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In half a century, 1717–67, 10,000 serious criminals were dumped on Maryland alone. They arrived chained in groups of ninety or more, looking and smelling like nothing on earth. Marginal planters regarded them as a good buy, especially if they had skills. They went into heavy labor—farming, digging, shipbuilding, the main Baltimore ironworks, for instance. In 1755 in Baltimore, one adult male worker in ten was a convict from Britain.165 They were much more troublesome than non-criminal indentured labor, always complaining of abuses and demanding ‘rights.’ People hated and feared them. Many were alcoholics or suicidal. Others had missing ears and fingers or gruesome scars. Some did well—one ex-thief qualified as a doctor and practiced successfully in Baltimore, attracting what he called ‘bisness a nuf for 2.’ But there were much talked-about horror-stories—one convict went mad in 1751 and attacked his master’s children with an axe; another cut off his hand rather than work. From Virginia, William Byrd II wrote loftily to an English friend: ‘I wish you would be so kind as to hang all your felons at home.’166 There were public demands that a head-tax be imposed on each convict landed or that purchasers be forced to post bonds for their good behavior. But the British authorities would never have allowed this. As a result of the convict influx we hear for the first time in America widespread complaints that crime was increasing and that standards of behavior had deteriorated. All this was blamed on Britain.
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Paul Johnson (A History of the American People)
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Where accidents happen in succession, there is a kind of instinctive relationship between them. Having once smelled blood, they come running with a passion, impatient to occur in their turn, drawn in by the magnetic field. You become a kind of accident attraction zone. New mothers, for example, are particularly fecund and fertile. We underestimate this capacity which events - particularly unfortunate events - have of reproducing themselves not sexually but by contiguity, by 'kairo- genesis'.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000)
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The inhibition of behavior provoked by cat odor is remarkably powerful and long-lasting. As summarized in Figure 1.1, following a single exposure to cat odor, animals continued to exhibit inhibition of play for up to five successive days. Our interpretation of this effect is that some unconditioned attribute of cat smell can innately arouse a fear system in the rat brain, and this emotional state becomes rapidly associated with the contextual cues of the chamber.
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Jaak Panksepp (Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Series in Affective Science))
“
He had been thinking, in that moment, about success, and about the fact that the book he had written in the filthy and oppressive basement studio that used to be his workplace had through its worldwide sales transported him here, to this large and pleasant room in the pleasant home he now owned with a view of his beautiful gardens. He had also bought several new items of furniture with his money, including the Mies van der Rohe chair in which he had at that moment been sitting. He could feel the soft leather beneath his thighs; his nostrils were full of its rich, luxurious smell. These sensations were still quite alien to him, yet he was aware that they were causing a new part of him, a new self, to grow. He had no associations with them but those associations were being created right now, while he sat there: he was actively and by small degrees becoming distanced from the person he had been, while becoming by the same small degrees someone new.
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Rachel Cusk
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Take perfume advertisements. What’s the product? A yellowish liquid that looks a bit like urine. Now that doesn’t equate to compelling ad copy. What is the product’s product? The yellowish liquid smells nice. Yet smelling nice is still not why people buy perfume. Advertisements selling the smell are not very successful. No, it’s the product’s product’s product that you must sell. For perfume? Yes, it’s sex.
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Annie Grace (This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life)
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Successful negotiations are invariably conducted from a position of power, or at least the perception of power. Strolling into a meeting wearing a comfortable robe and smelling of incense, with a sincere desire to iron out difficulties, is, perversely, a surefire way to get everyone killed.
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Eoin Colfer (And Another Thing... (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #6))
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actively look for good news, particularly the little stuff of daily life: the faces of children, the smell of an orange, a memory from a happy vacation, a minor success at work, and so on. Whatever positive facts you find, bring a mindful awareness to them—open up to them and let them affect you.
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Rick Hanson (Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom)
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I felt I was back to where I belonged. An India where success doesn't lie in money. It lies in surviving. The complex India. The difficult India. The corrupt India. The honest India. The oppressed India. The feudal India. A regressive India. A progressive India. It's poor. It's filthy. It’s hard working. It smells of struggle, of co-existence, of sweat. Its diversity, its disparity, the chaos, the conflict. The aspirational India, the ignored India, the defeated India... The real India.
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Vivek Agnihotri (Urban Naxals: The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam)
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You recognize that your time here is limited, start smelling the roses, and begin affording yourself the happiness you deserve. So if in adulthood you find you’re stressed, even unhappy at times, recognize that this is a normal part of the journey and just keep on keepin’ on.
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Scott Galloway (The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning)
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When you dwell within the land of the dead it stands to reason you'll end up smelling of decay. You are who you're around.
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Billy Juste
“
Surround yourself with flowers so that you can smell the scent of your success.
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Qi Zareen
“
When I have pictorially captured smell, the most palpable of the senses, the next thing will be to imprison sound- vulgarly speaking, to bottle it. Just think a moment. Force is as imperishable as matter; indeed, as I have been somewhat successful in showing, it is matter. Now, when a sound wave is once started, it is only lost through an indefinite extension of its circumference. Catch that sound wave, sir! Catch it in a bottle, then its circumference cannot extend. You may keep the sound wave forever if you will only keep it corked up tight. The only difficulty is in bottling it in the first place. I shall attend to the details of that operation just as soon as I have managed to photograph the confounded rotten-egg smell of sulphydric acid." The professor stirred up the offensive mixture with a glass rod, and continued: "While my object in bottling sound is mainly scientific, I must confess that I see in success in that direction a prospect of considerable pecuniary profit. I shall be prepared at no distant day to put operas in quart bottles, labeled and assorted, and contemplate a series of light and popular airs in ounce vials at prices to suit the times. You know very well that it costs a ten-dollar bill now to take a lady to hear Martha or Mignon, rendered in first-class style. By the bottle system, the same notes may be heard in one's own parlor at a comparatively trifling expense. I could put the operas into the market at from eighty cents to a dollar a bottle. For oratorios and symphonies I should use demijohns, and the cost would of course be greater. I don't think that ordinary bottles would hold Wagner's music. It might be necessary to employ carboys. Sir, if I were of the sanguine habit of you Americans, I should say that there were millions in it. Being a phlegmatic Teuton, accustomed to the precision and moderation of scientific language, I will merely say that in the success of my experiments with sound I see a comfortable income, as well as great renown. A SCIENTIFIC MARVEL By this time the professor had another negative, but an eager examination of it yielded nothing more satisfactory than before. He sighed and continued: "Having photographed smell and bottled sound, I shall proceed to a project as much higher than this as the reflective faculties are higher than the perceptive, as the brain is more exalted than the ear or nose. "I am perfectly satisfied that elements of mind are just as susceptible of detection and analysis as elements of matter. Why, mind is matter. "The soul spectroscope, or, as it will better be known, Dummkopf's duplex self-registering soul spectroscope, is based on the broad fact that whatever is material may be analyzed and determined by the position of the Frauenhofer lines upon the spectrum. If soul is matter, soul may thus be analyzed and determined. Place a subject under the light, and the minute exhalations or
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Edward Page Mitchell (The Clock that went Backwards and other Stories (Classics Book 7))
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Somehow it was all tied up with a story he’d heard once, about a boy born with a golden screw where his navel should have been. For twenty years he consults doctors and specialists all over the world, trying to get rid of this screw, and having no success. Finally, in Haiti, he runs into a voodoo doctor who gives him a foul-smelling potion. He drinks it, goes to sleep and has a dream. In this dream he finds himself on a street, lit by green lamps. Following the witch-man’s instructions, he takes two rights and a left from his point of origin, finds a tree growing by the seventh street light, hung all over with colored balloons. On the fourth limb from the top there is a red balloon; he breaks it and inside is a screwdriver with a yellow plastic handle. With the screwdriver he removes the screw from his stomach, and as soon as this happens he wakes from the dream. It is morning. He looks down toward his navel, the screw is gone. That twenty years’ curse is lifted at last. Delirious with joy, he leaps up out of bed, and his ass falls off.
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Thomas Pynchon (V.)
“
The first Superfortress reached Tokyo just after midnight, dropping flares to mark the target area. Then came the onslaught. Hundreds of planes—massive winged mechanical beasts roaring over Tokyo, flying so low that the entire city pulsed with the booming of their engines. The US military’s worries about the city’s air defenses proved groundless: the Japanese were completely unprepared for an attacking force coming in at five thousand feet.
The full attack lasted almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. LeMay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm—a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles. Buildings burst into flame before the fire ever reached them. Mothers ran from the fire with their babies strapped to their backs only to discover—when they stopped to rest—that their babies were on fire. People jumped into the canals off the Sumida River, only to drown when the tide came in or when hundreds of others jumped on top of them. People tried to hang on to steel bridges until the metal grew too hot to the touch, and then they fell to their deaths.
After the war, the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded: “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.”
As many as 100,000 people died that night. The aircrews who flew that mission came back shaken.
[According to historian] Conrad Crane: “They’re about five thousand feet, they are pretty low... They are low enough that the smell of burning flesh permeates the aircraft...They actually have to fumigate the aircraft when they land back in the Marianas, because the smell of burning flesh remains within the aircraft.
(...)
The historian Conrad Crane told me:
I actually gave a presentation in Tokyo about the incendiary bombing of Tokyo to a Japanese audience, and at the end of the presentation, one of the senior Japanese historians there stood up and said, “In the end, we must thank you, Americans, for the firebombing and the atomic bombs.”
That kind of took me aback. And then he explained: “We would have surrendered eventually anyway, but the impact of the massive firebombing campaign and the atomic bombs was that we surrendered in August.”
In other words, this Japanese historian believed: no firebombs and no atomic bombs, and the Japanese don’t surrender. And if they don’t surrender, the Soviets invade, and then the Americans invade, and Japan gets carved up, just as Germany and the Korean peninsula eventually were.
Crane added, The other thing that would have happened is that there would have been millions of Japanese who would have starved to death in the winter.
Because what happens is that by surrendering in August, that givesMacArthur time to come in with his occupation forces and actually feedJapan...I mean, that’s one of MacArthur’s great successes: bringing in a massive amount of food to avoid starvation in the winter of 1945.He is referring to General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander for the Allied powers in the Pacific. He was the one who accepted theJapanese emperor’s surrender.Curtis LeMay’s approach brought everyone—Americans and Japanese—back to peace and prosperity as quickly as possible. In 1964, the Japanese government awarded LeMay the highest award their country could give a foreigner, the First-Class Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun, in appreciation for his help in rebuilding the Japanese Air Force. “Bygones are bygones,” the premier of Japan said at the time.
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Malcolm Gladwell
“
Throughout our marriage, an ongoing joke between Chris and me was my succession of pledges to her each time I took on a new, challenging job. I would promise that, if she would let me get through just this next one, we would finally slow down and take time for ourselves. This started while I was working and going to night law school. I promised her, “Just wait till I get law school under my belt.” But after that, it was, “Just wait for me to finish this clerkship.” And then, “Just wait for me to make partner at the law firm.” When President George H. W. Bush came to the Department of Justice in 1991 for my swearing-in as Attorney General, I gave remarks in which I went through the whole litany, and ended with, “So Chris, I promise: once I get this Attorney Generalship under my belt, we will take time to smell the flowers.” Everyone laughed. But I did not keep my word. Instead, I had accepted a demanding corporate job that had me commuting every week for nearly fifteen years to the New York area, while she bore the main burden of raising our three daughters. It was time for me to come through.
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William P. Barr (One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General)
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I can smell that kind of ambition. It’s not about making the world better, it’s about using marvelous potential and intelligence to . . .” She paused to think. “To feel like they matter. I won’t work with people like that, because if they don’t think they matter despite being some of the most successful, important, influential people on earth, what must they think of the rest of us?
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Hank Green (A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (The Carls, #2))
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The victory over Pakistan unleashed a huge wave of patriotic sentiment. It was hailed as ‘India’s first military victory in centuries’,53 speaking in terms not of India the nation, but of India the land mass and demographic entity. In the first half of the second millennium a succession of foreign armies had come in through the north-west passage to plunder and conquer. Later rulers were Christian rather than Muslim, and came by sea rather than overland. Most recently, there had been that crushing defeat at the hands of the Chinese. For so long used to humiliation and defeat, Indians could at last savour the sweet smell of military success.
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Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi: A History (3rd Edition, Revised and Updated))
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Stressors in the biological domain include inadequate nutrition, sleep, or exercise; motor and sensorimotor challenges (a child finds it hard to run or to go down a flight of stairs without holding on to a rail); noise, sights, touch, smells, and other kinds of stimuli; pollution, allergens, and extreme heat and cold.
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Stuart Shanker (Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life)
“
Fill-In-the-Blank Headlines with Examples They Didn't Think I Could ________, but I Did. This headline works well for many reasons, including our natural tendency to root for the underdog. We're fascinated with stories of people who overcome great obstacles and others' ridicule to achieve success. When this headline refers to something you have thought about doing, but talked yourself out of, you'll want to know if the successful person shared your doubt or fear or handicap. Examples: They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano — but Not When I Started to Play! They Grinned When the Waiter Spoke to Me in French — but Their Laughter Changed to Amazement at My Reply! Who Else Wants ________? I like this type of headline because of its strong implication that a lot of other people know something the reader doesn't. Examples: Who Else Wants a Hollywood Actress' Figure? Who Else Needs an Extra Hour Every Day? How ________ Made Me ________ This headline introduces a first-person story. People love stories and are remarkably interested in other people. This headline structure seems to work best with dramatic differences. Examples: How a “Fool Stunt” Made Me a Star Salesman. How a Simple Idea Made Me “Plant Manager of the Year.” How Relocating to Tennessee Saved Our Company $1 Million a Year Are You ________? The question headline is used to grab attention by challenging, provoking, or arousing curiosity. Examples: Are You Ashamed of the Smells in Your House? Are You Prepared for the Next Stock Market Crash? How I ________ Very much like How ________ Made Me ________, this headline introduces a first-person story. The strength of the benefit at the end, obviously, controls its success. Examples: How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling. How I Retired at Age 40 — With a Guaranteed Income for Life.
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Dan S. Kennedy (The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost your Sales.)
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[10] Give up your faults and direct your hands aright, and cleanse your heart from all sin. [11] Offer a sweet-smelling sacrifice, and a memorial portion of fine flour, and pour oil on your offering, as much as you can afford. [12] And give the physician his place, for the Lord created him; let him not leave you, for there is need of him. [13] There is a time when success lies in the hands of physicians, [14] for they too will pray to the Lord that he should grant them success in diagnosis and in healing, for the sake of preserving life. [15] He who sins before his Maker, may he fall into the care of a physician.
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Joseph B. Lumpkin (The Encyclopedia of Lost and Rejected Scriptures: The Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha)
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Success is living up to your potential. That's all. Wake up with a smile and go after life … live it, enjoy it, taste it, smell it, feel it.
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Joe Knapp
“
(1) I will get in touch with the field of pure potentiality by taking time each day to be silent, to just Be. I will also sit alone in silent meditation at least twice a day for approximately thirty minutes in the morning and thirty minutes in the evening. (2) I will take time each day to commune with nature and to silently witness the intelligence within every living thing. I will sit silently and watch a sunset, or listen to the sound of the ocean or a stream, or simply smell the scent of a flower. In the ecstasy of my own silence, and by communing with nature, I will enjoy the life throb of ages, the field of pure potentiality and unbounded creativity. (3) I will practice non-judgment. I will begin my day with the statement, “Today, I shall judge nothing that occurs,” and throughout the day I will remind myself not to judge.
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Deepak Chopra (The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams)
“
The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up?
And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
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John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)
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A lazy hand cannot smell true success, no matter his level of faith, hope, and or aspiration.
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Daniel Anikor