Patrick Süskind

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.

A guard was like a sphinx. He functioned not by some deed, but rather by his mere bodily presence.

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.

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.

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

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.

He felt only the sentiment that is generally termed tolerance: a very lukewarm emotional stew of disgust, contempt, and sympathy.

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.