Quotes from Patrick Süskind

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.

You see?' said Baldini, equally both satisfied and disappointed; and he straightened up. 'You can't do it. Of course you can't. 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.

It was as if he had been born a second time; no, not a second time, the first time, for until now he had merely existed like an animal with a most nebulous self-awareness.

He was very suspicious of inventions, for they always meant that some rule would have to be broken.

How awful, that an honest man should feel compelled to travel such crooked paths!

Man's misfortune stems from the fact that he does not want to stay in the room where he belongs.

It was as if he were just playing, splashing and swishing like a child busy cooking up some ghastly brew of water, grass, and mud, which he then asserts to be soup.

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

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