Patrick Süskind

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.