Patrick Süskind Quotes

Naturally, the gnome had everything to do with it.

Whoever has survived his own birth on a rubbish heap is not so easily shoved back out of this world again.

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.

The wind blew cold, and he was freezing, but he did not notice that he was freezing, for within him was a counter-frost, fear.

If this one, most essential freedom was taken from you, the freedom, that is, to withdraw from other people when necessity called, then all other freedoms were worthless. Then life had no more meaning. Then it would be better to be dead.

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

The river ... glittered now here, now there, moving ever closer, as if a giant hand were scattering millions of louis-d'or over the water. For a moment it seemed the direction of the river had changed: it was flowing toward Baldini, a shimmering flood of pure gold.

People are stupid and use their noses only for blowing, but believe absolutely anything they see with their eyes.

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.

With one glance he had got himself trapped in the brown fundament of her eyes, he was in danger of sinking, as if into a soft, brown swamp, and had to close his eyes for a second to get out of it.

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

The scheduled execution of one of the most abominable criminals of the age degenerated into the largest orgy the world had seen since the second century before Christ.

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

So spoke Grenouille the Great and, while the peasantry of scent danced and celebrated beneath him, he glided with wide-stretched wings down from his golden clouds, across the nocturnal fields of his soul, and home to his heart.

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