# Quote — Patrick Süskind, Perfume

> 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.

- Author: [Patrick Süskind](https://www.leafyquotes.com/patrick-suskind.md)
- Book: [Perfume](https://www.leafyquotes.com/patrick-suskind/perfume.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Patrick_S%C3%BCskind#Part_2) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/patrick-suskind/perfume/no-longer-distracted

## More from this book

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/patrick-suskind/perfume/he-was-very.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/patrick-suskind/perfume/even-knowing-that.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/patrick-suskind/perfume/people-could-close.md)