{"id":17668,"date":"2018-06-07T12:09:38","date_gmt":"2018-06-07T16:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wyliecomm.com\/?page_id=17668"},"modified":"2022-12-16T11:46:09","modified_gmt":"2022-12-16T15:46:09","slug":"quotes-on-scent","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.wyliecomm.com\/writing-tips\/how-to-write-creative-content\/how-to-make-writing-more-descriptive\/quotes-on-scent\/","title":{"rendered":"Quotes on scent"},"content":{"rendered":"

What writers & others say<\/h2>\n

\"Quotes

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\u201cSmells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences. Hit a tripwire of smell, and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Diane Ackerman, author,\u00a0A Natural History of the Senses<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“Claire had read that the portion of the brain responsible for processing smells was one of the more primitive parts, making it in the sense that aroused the most emotions.<\/h5>\n
“The same article had talked about what smells people associated with their childhoods, saying that people over fifty associated being a kid with natural scents, like bread baking or the sweetish smell of manure, while anyone younger than fifty thought of childhood when they smelled artificial smells, like the scent of crayons or Play-Doh.<\/h5>\n
“For Claire, it happened when she smelled a particular kind of cheap plastic \u2014 a reminder of a doll that had miraculously materialized under the Christmas tree straight from the pages of the Sears Wish Book. Or sometimes at work when she ripped open a freshly printed pack of forms she would be back in fifth grade again, sniffing the milky scent of mimeograph paper.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 April Henry, novelist, in Circles of Confusion<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived,” she wrote.<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Helen Keller, deaf-and-blind author and activist<\/h6>\n
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\u201cThe best writers are writers with highly cultivated senses. They revel in touch, taste and smell. They look intently at the world around them. They sense the rhythms of language. They are insatiably curious.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 James J. Kilpatrick, journalist and author of\u00a0The Writer\u2019s Art<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cGood reporters have a nose for news. They can sniff out a story. Smell a scandal. Give them a whiff of corruption and they\u2019ll root it out like a pig diving for truffles. If that\u2019s true, why do so few of them take advantage of that olfactory skill in their writing?”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Chip Scanlan, senior faculty-writing at The Poynter Institute<\/h6>\n
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\u201cWrite with the senses, editors and writing teachers implore. And most of us do that, providing our readers with vivid images and resonant sounds. But hunt high and low in today\u2019s newspaper for a sense of smell and most days you\u2019ll come up as empty as a bloodhound who\u2019s lost the scent. Even the food pages, which one would expect to be as aromatic as a bakery before dawn, are generally odorless. Tastes abound, but smells, the scents that get the salivary juices running, are absent.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Chip Scanlan, senior faculty-writing at The Poynter Institute<\/h6>\n
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\u201cSmell may be the most evocative of the five senses, but I defy you to find any in news stories, even the food pages.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Chip Scanlan, senior faculty-writing, The Poynter Institute<\/h6>\n
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\u201cNeuroscience is the hottest topic in the academic world today. \u2026 [O]ne of the things they\u2019re studying is the sense of smell \u2014 the Proust effect. You\u2019ll remember \u2014 we\u2019ve all read our Proust \u2014 that there\u2019s this great passage in which the aroma of madeleines, these little rich cakes that they love in France, evokes this torrent of memory in Proust. And, as we all know, there\u2019s no sense that reaches more deeply and suddenly into our emotional center \u2014 right into the solar plexus \u2014 than the sense of smell.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Tom Wolfe, one of the creators of New Journalism, speaking at the annual dinner of the Olfactory Research Fund<\/h6>\n
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