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Hitler: My dog’s got no nose.
Soldiers: How does he smell?
Hitler: Awful. Monty Python’s And Now For Something Completely Different, 1972 starring Graham Chapman & John Cleese & Terry Gilliam & Eric Idle & Terry Jones & Michael Palin & Carol Cleveland & Connie Booth et al, director Ian MacNaughton
With over two hundred and twenty million smell-sensitive receptors in their noses a dog’s sense of smell is one of the most powerful, over forty times more than human’s. Weird or What? s1e4: Grim Reapers, Discovery 2010
Smelling your way to a happier life is all the rage. Penn & Teller, Bullshit! s7e9: Stress, Showtime 2009
Personally I’d rather smell things like ... pussy. ibid.
[Holmes inhales deeply] Ah! Putrefaction. Sherlock Holmes 2009 starring Robert Downey junior & Jude Law & Mark Strong & Rachel McAdams & Kelly Reilly & Eddie Marsan & Geraldine James & Hans Matheson & James Fox & Robert Maillet et al, director Guy Ritchie
I’m going to be honest with you. I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, or whatever you want to call it. I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell. The Matrix 1999 starring Keanu Reeves & Laurence Fishburne & Carrie-Anne Moss & Hugo Weaving & Joe Pantoliano & Gloria Foster & Marcus Chong & Julian Arahanga & Matt Doran & Belinda McClory et al, directors Andy & Lana Wachowski, man in black to Morpheus
It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home. Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
Smell that: furniture polish, cheap cologne and body odour. Runaway Jury 2003 starring Gene Hackman & John Cusack & Dustin Hoffman & Rachel Weisz & Jeremy Piven & Bruce Davison & Bruce McGill & Marguerite Moreau & Nick Searcy & Leland Orser et al, director Gary Fleder, Hackman in court
It is the scent that first speaks of love. Star Trek: The Next Generation s3e25: Transfigurations, Worf to Geordi
The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world. Jean Cocteau
I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer – and what trees and seasons smelled like – how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich. John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Smell – something that would give them a distinct hunting advantage. Planet Dinosaur 3/6: Last Killers, BBC 2011
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet. William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet 1996 starring Leonardo DiCaprio & Brian Dennehy & Christina Pickles & Dash Mihok & Jesse Bradford & Zak Orth & Claire Danes & Paul Sorvino & Diane Venora & John Leguizamo & Harold Perrineau & Pete Postlethwaite & Paul Rudd & Vondie Curtis-Hall et al, director Baz Luhrmann, Juliet
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94
Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains. Diane Ackerman
I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air. Margaret Thatcher
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly though the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quick enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. George Orwell, 1984 p1
The spike consisted simply of a bathroom and lavatory and, for the rest, long double rows of stone cells, perhaps a hundred cells in all. It was a bare, gloomy place of stone and whitewash, unwillingly clean, with a smell which, somehow, I had foreseen from its appearance; a smell of soft soap, Jeyes’ fluid and latrines – a cold, discouraging, prisonish smell. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
There were generally four of us in the bedroom, and a beastly place it was, with the defiled impermanent look of rooms that are not serving their rightful purpose … The room had been turned into a bedroom by thrusting four squalid beds in among this other wreckage … All the windows were kept tight shut, with a red sandbag jammed in the bottom, and in the morning the room stank like a ferret’s cage. You did not notice it when you got up, but if you went out of the room and came back, the smell hit you in the face with a smack. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away. Helen Keller
Masculine exhalations are, as a rule, stronger, more vivid, more widely differentiated than those of women. In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all the things strong and beautiful and joyous and gives me a sense of physical happiness. Helen Keller
Outside the bus the smell of sulphur hit Bond with sickening force. It was a horrible smell, from somewhere down in the stomach of the world. Ian Fleming, Diamonds are Forever
She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above. George R R Martin, A Storm of Swords
For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that we use it so little. Rachel Carson
The bigger they are, the worse they smell. George Carlin
I love the smell of book ink in the morning. Umberto Eco
A sharp but not unpleasant smell rose from his white jeans, a blend of semen and engine coolant. J G Ballard, Crash p102
Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat alluvial soil below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume of the summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein a vast pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the animals, the very bees and butterflies, drowsy. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by the awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man