“A well-worn marriage was like a shop-soiled currency note. Its only fault was that it had been in circulation for too long – it didn’t smell fresh, feel crisp to your fingers and fill you with a sense of possibilities as you held it in your hand, like a newly minted, fresh-from-the-press one did.”

“It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy.”

“There is something about the aroma of fresh books that's totally intoxicating. A new book has a certain clean, crisp smell full of promise that is difficult to define. Sort of like the scent and feeling of just-washed bed linens at the moment you slide your legs between them.”

“Sooner or later your fingers close on that one moist-cold spud that the spade has accidentally sliced clean through, shining wetly white and giving off the most unearthly of earthly aromas. It's the smell of fresh soil in the spring, but fresh soil somehow distilled or improved upon, as if that wild, primordial scene has been refined and bottled: eau de pomme de terre. You can smell the cold inhuman earth in it, but there's the cozy kitchen to, for the smell of potatoes is, at least by now, to us, the smell of comfort itself, a smell as blankly welcoming as spud flesh, a whiteness that takes up memories and sentiments as easily as flavors. To smell a raw potato is to stand on the very threshold of the domestic and the wild. (241)”

“Lettuce is like conversation; it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.”

“Ok, she was close to being right. I did have a thing about cats. And I didn’t particularly have a good reason for feeling that way. It was as if it was, innate. Tara on the other hand had this freakish affinity towards them, or should I say, they towards her. It was like she had the fresh scent of salmon that only cats could smell. It was endearing, and a little creepy.”