Patrick Süskind

People could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they couldn't escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath.

Man's misfortune stems from the fact that he does not want to stay in the room where he belongs.

He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and malice.

No human being can go on living in the same house with a pigeon, a pigeon is the epitome of chaos and anarchy.

He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!

All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language were enough for the lad Grenouille to doubt that language made any sense at all.

When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.

Odours have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions or will. The persuasive power of an odour cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally.

She had a face so charming that visitors of all ages and both sexes would stand stock-still at the sight of her, unable to pull their eyes away, practically licking that face with their eyes, the way tongues work at ice cream, with that typically stupid, single-minded expression on their faces that goes with concentrated licking.

In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.

He wallowed in disgust and loathing, and his hair stood on end at the delicious horror.

A guard was like a sphinx. He functioned not by some deed, but rather by his mere bodily presence.

He did not want to have his newfound respiratory freedom ruined so soon be the sultry climate of humans.

The odour of humans is always a fleshly odour—that is, a sinful odour.

She was one of those languid women made of dark honey, smooth and sweet and terribly sticky, who take control of a room with a syrupy gesture, a toss of the hair, a single slow whiplash of the eyes—and all the while remain as still as the center of a hurricane, apparently unaware of the force of gravity by which they irresistibly attract to themselves the yearnings and the souls of both men and women.