Patrick Süskind Quotes

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!

God stank. God was a poor little stinker.

Suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred—in hating and in being hated.

What had civilized man lost that he was looking for out there in jungles inhabited by Indians or Negroes?

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.

He would be able to create a scent that was not merely human, but superhuman, an angel's scent.

You're one of those people who know whether there is chervil or parsley in the soup at meal-time. That's fine, there's something to be said for that. But that doesn't make you a cook.

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

The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter.

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

He had no use for sensual gratification, unless that gratification consisted of pure, incorporeal odors.

No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid. He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating—and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake had lived in the world outside.

The horrible, oppressive, vaporous, pigeon blue-gray sky.

He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.

Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself!