Quotes from Patrick Süskind

There were no mad flashings of the eye, no lunatic grimace passed over his face. He was not out of his mind, which was so clear and buoyant that he asked himself why he wanted to do it at all. And he said to himself that he wanted to do it because he was evil, thoroughly evil. And he smiled as he said it and was content. He looked quite innocent, like any happy person.

But he did decide vegetatively, as a bean when once tossed aside must decide if it ought to germinate or had better let things be.

He no longer yearned for his life in the cave. He had experienced that life once and it had proved unlivable. Just as had his other experience - life among human beings. He was suffocated by both worlds. He no longer wanted to live at all.

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 wide world outside.

He looks as if he were three or four; looks just like one of those unapproachable, incomprehensible, willful little prehuman creatures, who in their ostensible innocence think only of themselves, who want to subordinate the whole world to their despotic will, and would do it, too, if one let them pursue their megalomaniacal ways and did not apply the strictest pedagogical principles to guide them to a disciplined, self-controlled, fully human existence.

He was a master in the art of spreading boredom and playing the clumsy fool-though never so egregiously that people might enjoy making fun of him or use him as the butt of some crude practical joke inside the guild. He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.

He had soon so thoroughly smelled out the quarter between Saint-Eustache and the Hôtel de Ville that he could find his way around in it by pitch-dark night. And so he expanded his hunting grounds, first westward to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, then out along the rue Saint-Antoine to the Bastille, and finally across to the other bank of the river into the quarters of the Sorbonne and the Faubourg Saint-Germain where the rich people lived.

bathed in sweat and trembling with agitation, no, not with agitation, but with fear, for he finally admitted it to himself: it was naked fear that had seized him, and in admitting it he grew calmer and his thoughts clearer

Ignorance is the only possible happiness this world has to offer

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.

No human being can go on living in the same house with a pigeon, a pigeon is the epitomy of chaos and anarchy, a pigeon that whizzes around unpredictably, that sets it's claws in you, picks at your eyes..

As he began to withdraw from them, it became clear to Grenouille for the first time that for eighteen years 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. You could live, so it seemed, in this world, in this world devoid of humanity. On

The odour of humans is always a fleshly odour – that is, a sinful odour.

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.

Encontrar el camino no era difícil, lo difícil era luchar contra el recuerdo de la pesadilla claustrofóbica, que avanzaba en su interior, como una marea… Pero tenía valor; es decir, luchaba contra el miedo de no saber, contra el temor de la incertidumbre, y su lucha era efectiva porque sabía que no podía escoger.

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

He disgusted them the way a fat spider that you can't bring yourslef to crush in your own hand disgusts you.

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.

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

?? có th? giã t? cõi ??i khiêm nh??ng nhÆ° th? c?n Ä'ôi chút t?i thi?u lòng t?t b?m sinh...

Als Schubert so alt war wie ich, da war er schon drei Jahre tot.

For Grenouille, this simplicity seemed a deliverance.

Este presentimiento resultaría cierto, aunque se basaba en premisas totalmente falsas.

Au XVIIIe siècle vécut en France un homme qui compta parmi les personnages les plus géniaux et les plus abominables de cette époque qui pourtant ne manqua pas de génies abominables.