Odors have an altogether peculiar force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight or the hearing.
Interpretation
Odors have a unique ability to influence our emotions and memories, distinct from other senses.
In this quote, Edgar Allan Poe highlights the significant impact that smells can have on our psychological and emotional experiences. Unlike other senses, odors can evoke vivid memories and feelings due to their strong associations, demonstrating the profound connection between scent and our personal histories.
In practice
A speaker might use this quote to illustrate the power of memory during a psychology lecture.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him desolate!) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed, Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed.
Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.
...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.
I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?
In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden-beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.
Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.
I have won important things for myself, but I'm going to destroy them, because I tell myself they have lost their meaning. I know that is not true. I know they are important, and that if I destroy them, I'll be destroying myself, as well.
Asking who won a given war, someone has said, is like asking who won the San Francisco earthquake. That in war there is no victory but only varying degrees of defeat is a proposition that has gained increasing acceptance in the twentieth century.
Donβt let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.
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