Patrick Süskind
Quotes
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.
