Creativity Quote by Jacqueline du Pre

Du Pre’s line reads like a rush of sound translated into smell: not a polite countryside vignette, but an overload. “Intense perfumes” pushes past prettiness into saturation, the way a fortissimo can stop being “beautiful” and start feeling physical. The detail that matters is “as we trod them underfoot.” Fragrance isn’t arriving as a gift from nature; it’s released by pressure, by movement, by a kind of inadvertent violence. Pleasure comes with complicity. That’s the subtext: ecstasy is made, not merely found, and it carries the mark of what it costs.

“Almost drunk” is the masterstroke because it refuses the sanctimony of transcendence. Du Pre doesn’t reach for holiness or purity; she reaches for intoxication, a bodily metaphor that’s a little unruly. It captures that familiar moment when sensation outruns language and you borrow the vocabulary of excess. “Almost” keeps it honest. She’s not romanticizing oblivion; she’s describing the threshold where the self loosens.

Contextually, it lands with extra force coming from a musician whose fame was built on intensity and immediacy. Du Pre’s playing is often described in the same terms: voluptuous tone, emotional candor, a willingness to press into the phrase until it yields something raw. This sentence performs that same aesthetic in miniature. It’s not about herbs. It’s about how art - and life, at their most vivid - can feel like an altered state, produced by contact, friction, and the nerve to step forward.