Patrick Süskind Quotes

Even knowing that to possess that scent he must pay the terrible price of losing it again, the very possession and the loss seemed to him more desirable than a prosaic renunciation of both. For he had renounced things all his life. But never once had he possessed and lost.

What he coveted was the odor of certain human beings: that is, those rare humans who inspire love. These were his victims.

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

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

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

God stank. God was a poor little stinker.

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

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.

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.

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.

It was good, really, that this external world still existed, if only as a place of refuge.

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

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.

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

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.