Patrick Süskind

Patrick Süskind (born 26 March 1949) is a German writer and screenwriter, known best for his novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, first published in 1985.

Quotes

Perfume

Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders (Zurich: Diogenes, 1985); translated by John E. Woods, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986)

Part 1

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.
- Ch. 1

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.
- Ch. 1

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.
- Ch. 2 (Nurse loq.)

The odour of humans is always a fleshly odour—that is, a sinful odour.
- Ch. 3

He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and malice.
- Ch. 4

Whoever has survived his own birth on a rubbish heap is not so easily shoved back out of this world again.
- Ch. 4

He disgusted them the way a fat spider that you can't bring yourself to crush with your own hand disgusts you.
- Ch. 4

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.
- Ch. 5

Erfindung war ihm sehr suspekt, denn sie bedeutete immer den Bruch einer Regel.
- He was very suspicious of inventions, for they always meant that some rule would have to be broken.
- Ch. 11

What had civilized man lost that he was looking for out there in jungles inhabited by Indians or Negroes?
- Ch. 11

Man's misfortune stems from the fact that he does not want to stay in the room where he belongs.
- Ch. 11 (attrib. Pascal)

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!
- Ch. 11

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.
- Ch. 11

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.
- Ch. 13

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.
- Ch. 14 (Baldini loq.)

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.
- Ch. 14 (Baldini loq.)

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.
- Ch. 15

Naturally, the gnome had everything to do with it.
- Ch. 17

Part 2

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.
- Ch. 23

He did not want to have his newfound respiratory freedom ruined so soon be the sultry climate of humans.
- Ch. 23

Grenouille no longer wanted to go somewhere, but only to go away, away from human beings.
- Ch. 23

He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!
- Ch. 24

He had no use for sensual gratification, unless that gratification consisted of pure, incorporeal odors.
- Ch. 25

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.
- Ch. 25

He wallowed in disgust and loathing, and his hair stood on end at the delicious horror.
- Ch. 26

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.
- Ch. 26

Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself!
- Ch. 29

It was good, really, that this external world still existed, if only as a place of refuge.
- Ch. 29

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.
- Ch. 29

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.
- Ch. 30

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.
- Ch. 32

There were no mad flashings of the eye, no lunatic grimace passed over his face. ... He looked quite innocent, like any happy person.
- Ch. 32

God stank. God was a poor little stinker.
- Ch. 32

He would be able to create a scent that was not merely human, but superhuman, an angel's scent.
- Ch. 32

Part 3

People are stupid and use their noses only for blowing, but believe absolutely anything they see with their eyes.
- Ch. 35

He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.
- Ch. 37

What he coveted was the odor of certain human beings: that is, those rare humans who inspire love. These were his victims.
- Ch. 38

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.
- Ch. 39

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.
- Ch. 40

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.
- Ch. 41

He was so full of disgust, disgust at the world and at himself, that he could not weep.
- Ch. 48

Suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred—in hating and in being hated.
- Ch. 49

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.
- Ch. 49

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.
- Ch. 49

Part 4

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.
- Ch. 51

The Pigeon

Die Taube (Zurich: Diogenes, 1987); translated by John E. Woods, The Pigeon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988)

No human being can go on living in the same house with a pigeon, a pigeon is the epitome of chaos and anarchy.
- p. 19

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.
- pp. 41–2

A guard was like a sphinx. He functioned not by some deed, but rather by his mere bodily presence.
- p. 49

If this one, most essential freedom was taken from you, the freedom, that is, to withdraw from other people when necessity called, then all other freedoms were worthless. Then life had no more meaning. Then it would be better to be dead.
- p. 64

He had found his way to sphinxlike imperturbability.
- p. 65

He felt only the sentiment that is generally termed tolerance: a very lukewarm emotional stew of disgust, contempt, and sympathy.
- pp. 65–6

Whatever came within his field of vision Jonathan coated with the vile patina of his hate.
- p. 88

The horrible, oppressive, vaporous, pigeon blue-gray sky.
- p. 91

External links

Wikipedia

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Patrick Süskind