“Red-bellied hummingbirds and hard-beaked toucans banked in the mist rising up in wet clouds. The air shook around jagged rock columns that thrust from swirling water thrown white from brown waves. The scent of the muddy river mixed with the ripe jungle smells of rotting leaves and flowers.”

“The apple trees were in full bloom, the scent enveloping the party in a heady, almost palpable mist, and pale petals rocked on the glittering surface of the water and lay in white mats against the banks.”

“At night she began cooking things in the kitchen, things too strange to mention. She steeped oleander in boiling water, and the roots of a vine with white trumpet flowers that glowed like faces. She soaked a plant collected in moonlight from the neighbors’ fence, with little heart-shaped flowers. Then she cooked the water down; the whole kitchen smelled like green and rotting leaves. She threw out pounds of the wet-spinach green stuff into somebody else’s dumpster. She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She sat on the roof and talked to the moon.”

“Fresh flowers bloomed from vases, sweetly scenting the air. Again, he had no idea. Fine. He'd requested those. That shit smelled good.”

“Midsummer Night was roasting hot. The shore, of red granite, glowed with the heat; the dark blood of the earth seemed to be rising from below. There was a sharp, unbearable smell of birds, of cod, of green decaying seaweed. Through the mist the huge ruddy sun loomed nearer and nearer. And in the sea, dark blood welled up to meet it - in bloated, rearing, huge white waves. Night. The mouth of the bay between two cliffs was like a window. A window shutting out curious eyes with a white shade-white woolly fog. And all that you could see was that behind it something red was happening. ("The North")”

“The fragrance of white tea is the feeling of existing in the mists that float over waters; the scent of peony is the scent of the absence of negativity: a lack of confusion, doubt, and darkness; to smell a rose is to teach your soul to skip; a nut and a wood together is a walk over fallen Autumn leaves; the touch of jasmine is a night's dream under the nomad's moon.”