“There was a smell about the place, which I imagined as the smell of misery and fear, though I supposed it was no more than the niff of ancient squalor and an absence of drains.”

“I´ve read that it´s the smell some carnivores use to find their prey. Imagine the trembling victim trying to hide, but knowing that the smell of its own fear will kill it.”

“The place smelled like Sam -- or, I guess, he smelled like the store. Like ink and old building and something more leafy than coffee but less interesting than weed. It was all very ... erudite. I felt surrounded by conversations I had no interest in participating in.”

“Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.”

“With the refinements that come with maturity the smells faded out, to be replaced by only one other distinctly memorable, distinctly pleasurable smell - the odour of cunt. More particularly the odour that lingers on the fingers after playing with a woman, for, if it has not been noticed before, this smell is even more enjoyable, perhaps because it already carried with it the perfume of the past tense, than the odour of the cunt itself. But this odour, which belongs to maturity, is but a faint odour compared with the odours attaching to childhood. It is an odour which evaporates, almost as quickly in the mind's imagination, as in reality. One can remember many things about the woman one has loved but it is hard to remember the smell of her cunt - with anything like certitude. The smell of wet hair, on the other hand, a woman's wet hair, is much more powerful and lasting - why, I don't know.”

“I read once that courage is not the absence of fear, but the decision that something is more important than that fear.”