I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.

When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.

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

. . .sometimes reading the same page over and over, until one sleepy afternoon something clicked, like a lock unlocking, and she saw those printed doors swing open on a vast house of words.

There was that special smell made up of paper, ink, and dust; the busy hush; the endless luxury of thousands of unread books. Best of all was the eager itch of anticipation as you went out the door with your arms loaded down with books.

He could smell her crackling white apron and the faint flavour of toast that always hung about her so deliciously.

It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me — they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self — there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long.

...the odor of literature as a stopgap, of words piled one upon the other to avoid taking action or to console oneself for being incapable of it.

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.

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...

There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure.

As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.

When she came to write her story, she would wonder when the books and the words started to mean not just something, but everything.