David Mitchell Quotes

Your second-hand bookseller is second to none in the worth of the treasures he dispenses.

A computer does not smell ... if a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better… And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.

I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.

When I write about things, it's a lot to do with sense memory. How things smell and taste can bring incredible memories flooding back and transport you in an instant to another time and place.

It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt.

When I got inside, I just sort of stood there. There's nothing stranger than the smell of someone else's house. The scent goes right to your stomach. Mary's house smelled like lemon furniture polish and oatmeal cookies and logs in a fireplace. For some reason it made me want to curl up in the fetal position. I could have slept right there on their kitchen table.

Touching his hair, she leaned hesitantly forward, and he folded his arms around her, sinking into sensation again as they kissed--the slight weight of her on his lap, the smell of her. He glided his hands up the warm dip of her spine, felt her shiver and press closer. He could never get enough of this. Never.

I fall in love with any girl who smells of library paste.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away.

The pillow smells like the sunlight, a precious smell.

In the past, I had particularly loved her smell. She always smelled freshed, freshly washed or of freshed laundry or fresh sweat or freshly loved

(in response to the question: what do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?) Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

When a kid says "smell my hand," it almost never smells like cinnamon.

As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air.

I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books--whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives.

I grew up on second hand bookshops and libraries.

Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them.