Asparagus lingers (in great literature)

In case you thought that asparagus was annoying because it makes your pee smell strongly...you were wrong! That just means you do not have refined sensibilities like Marcel Proust in Swann's Way which enable you to see the poetry in your nocturnal micturations subsequent to the ingestion of said dinner vegetable. Or, according to Wikipedia, you lack the genes which enable your ability to smell the digested asparagus compounds excreted in your urine. Hmm... In the words of Proust himself, asparagus is magical:

...But what delighted me were the asparagus, steeped in ultramarine, and pink, whose tips, delicately, painted, with little strokes of mauve and azure, shade off imperceptibly down to their feet--still soiled though they are from the dirt of their garden bed--with an iridescence that is not of this earth. It seemed to me that these celestial hues revealed the delicious creatures who had merrily metamorphosed themselves into vegetables and who, through the disguise of their firm, edible flesh, disclosed in these early tints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in this extinction of blue evenings, the precious essence that I recognized again when, all night long following a dinner at which i had eaten them, they played, in farces as crude and poetic as a fairy play by Shakespeare, at changing my chamber pot into a jar of perfume. (translated by Lydia Davis, 123-4)