“Unhappiness is a dangerous thing, like carbon monoxide. You don’t smell it, you don’t taste it, it’s formless and colourless, but it poisons slowly. It seeps into every pore of your skin until one day your heart just stops beating.”

Aided and abetted by market forces and the laws of supply and demand, he hones his skill to stand up but make sure he’s never counted.

I think women sign on for some ideal when they get married, and when they realise they haven’t got anything close to what they want, they bury their disappointment.

You don’t need to know what you’re escaping from to become a fugitive.

If America is the land of opportunity, a country where perseverance and hard work is rewarded by recognition, then an illegal harbors the opposite ambitions. His greatest reward us anonymity, invisibility.

Children expect their mothers to love them, no matter what. Those who don’t get this tend to feel cheated the rest of their lives.

Discontented women are like pressure cookers. The steam rises and one day they just reach boiling point.

Let me tell you something: You can live in a broken home, you can play with a broken toy, but you cannot love with a broken heart.

People aren’t often asked to make life or death decisions. There are no causes to die for. You can go through life never knowing which of your friends would really come through for you

Women only cut their hair in times of crisis… It’s somethin’ a woman always has the power to do, even when she loses control over everything else. Cuttin’ hair is a cry for help.

The world exists on thousands of different levels and just because some are more tragic than others, it doesn’t make them any more valid. You fall into that way of thinking and you become so overwhelmed by the world’s suffering, you go mad.

I don’t care what your nose says! The last time you smelled half-blood, it turned out to be a meatloaf sandwich!” “Meatloaf sandwiches are good! But this is a half-blood scent, I swear. They are on board!” “Bah, your brain isn’t on board!

The smell of a freshly printed book is the best smell in the world.

I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies.

There’s something tangible about the essence of the city. You can taste and smell it.

The smell of pine needles, spruce and the smell of a Christmas tree – those to me, are the scents of the holidays.

Through seven figures come sensations for a man; there is hearing for sounds, sight for the visible, nostril for smell, tongue for pleasant or unpleasant tastes, mouth for speech, body for touch, passages outwards and inwards for hot or cold breath. Through these come knowledge or lack of it.

I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

I think that when you smell good, you feel good. You know how when you’re in a room and someone else smells good, you’re like, ‘Where is that?’