en

Diane Ackerman

  • Alejandra Espinohas quotedlast year
    We may neutralize one or more of our senses temporarily—by floating in body-temperature water, for instance—but that only heightens the others. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses
  • Alejandra Espinohas quotedlast year
    It is both our panic and our privilege to be mortal and sense-full. We live on the leash of our senses. Although they enlarge us, they also limit and restrain us, but how beautifully.
  • Alejandra Espinohas quotedlast year
    senses—how they evolved, how they can be extended, what their limits are, to which ones we have attached taboos, and what they can teach us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit
  • Alejandra Espinohas quotedlast year
    Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived. T
  • Alejandra Espinohas quotedlast year
    Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences
  • Alejandra Espinohas quotedlast year
    Our sense of smell can be extraordinarily precise, yet it’s almost impossible to describe how something smells to someone who hasn’t smelled it
  • Alejandra Espinohas quotedlast year
    Smell is the mute sense, the one without words. Lacking a vocabulary, we are left tongue-tied, groping for words in a sea of inarticulate pleasure and exaltation
  • Alejandra Espinohas quotedlast year
    The charm of language is that, though it’s human-made, it can on rare occasions capture emotions and sensations which aren’t. But the physiological links between the smell and language centers of the brain are pitifully weak
  • Alejandra Espinohas quotedlast year
    Smells are our dearest kin, but we cannot remember their names
  • Alejandra Espinohas quotedlast year
    Paul West writes that “blood smells like dust.” An arresting metaphor, one that relies on indirection, as metaphors of smell almost always do
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