Perfume

He was very suspicious of inventions, for they always meant that some rule would have to be broken.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

God stank. God was a poor little stinker.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

He disgusted them the way a fat spider that you can't bring yourself to crush with your own hand disgusts you.

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

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.

Naturally, the gnome had everything to do with it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

Grenouille no longer wanted to go somewhere, but only to go away, away from human beings.

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.

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.

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.