Cynthia

“Plague doctors protected themselves from this contagious threat by wearing leather masks that covered their entire heads. They peered through goggles. The front of their masks formed a long beak packed with cinnamon, cloves, and opium, desiccated viper, and the ground remains of human mummies. The plague doctors believed that by breathing in the fragrance, they could block the contagion from entering their bodies.”
― Carl Zimmer, Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe

“When you inhale, you create a single airstream that allows you to both smell and breathe. But when a dog sniffs, structures within its nose split that airstream in two. Most of the air heads down into the lungs, but a smaller tributary, which is for smell and smell alone, zooms to the back of the snout. There it enters a labyrinth of thin, bony walls that are plastered with a sticky sheet called the olfactory epithelium. This is where smells are first detected.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.”
― Washington Irving