Patrick Süskind Quotes

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

There were no mad flashings of the eye, no lunatic grimace passed over his face. ... He looked quite innocent, like any happy person.

He felt only the sentiment that is generally termed tolerance: a very lukewarm emotional stew of disgust, contempt, and sympathy.

He was so full of disgust, disgust at the world and at himself, that he could not weep.

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.

Whatever the art or whatever the craft—and make a note of this before you go—talent means next to nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.

Constantly before his eyes now was a river flowing from him; and it was as if he himself and his house and the wealth he had accumulated over many decades were flowing away like the river, while he was too old and too weak to oppose the powerful current.

Their compacted human effluvium had oppressed him like air heavy with an imminent thunderstorm. Until now he had thought that it was the world in general he had wanted to squirm away from. But it was not the world, it was the people in it.

He was in very truth his own God, and a more splendid God than the God that stank of incense and was quartered in churches.

Their heads, up on top, at the back of the head, where the hair makes a cowlick...is where they smell best of all...Once you've smelled them there, you love them whether they’re your own or somebody else's.

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

His thesis was that life could develop only at a certain distance from the earth, since the earth itself constantly emits a corrupting gas, a so-called fluidum letale, which lames vital energies and sooner or later utterly extinguishes them.

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.

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.

These Diderots and d'Alemberts and Voltaires and Rousseaus...finally managed to infect the whole society with their perfidious fidgets, with their sheer delight in discontent and their unwillingness to be satisfied with anything in this world, in short, with the boundless chaos that reigns inside their own heads!