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; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
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A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
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Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do
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After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.
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Success produces success, just as money produces money.
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There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.
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Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
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Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.
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I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
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It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
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There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.
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I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
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