Patrick Suskind Quotes

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

— Patrick Suskind

“Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.”

— Patrick Suskind

“He possessed the power. He held it in his hand. A power stronger than the power of money or the power of terror or the power of death: the invincible power to command the love of mankind. There was only one thing that power could not do: it could not make him able to smell himself.”

— Patrick Suskind

“... in that moment, as he saw and smelled how irresistible its effect was and how with lightning speed it spread and made captives of the people all around him-in that moment his whole disgust for humankind rose up again within him and completely soured his triumph, so that he felt not only no joy, but not even the least bit of satisfaction. What he had always longed for-that other people should love him-became at the moment of his achievement unbearable, because he did not love them himself, he hated them. And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred-in hating and in being hated.”

— Patrick Suskind

“For 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. Together with breath it entered human beings, who couldn't defend themselves against it, not if they wanted to live. And scent entered into their very core, went directly to their hearts, and decided for good and all between affection and contempt, disgust and lust, love and hate. He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.”

— Patrick Suskind

“Not a visible enthusiasm but a hidden one, an excitement burning with a cold flame.”

— Patrick Suskind

“She was indeed a girl of exquisite beauty. She was one of those languid women made of dark honey smooth and sweet and terribly sticky.”

— Patrick Suskind

“He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid.”

— Patrick Suskind

“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.”

— Patrick Suskind

“There was only one thing the perfume could not do. It could not turn him into a person who could love and be loved like everyone else. So, to hell with it he thought. To hell with the world. With the perfume. With himself”

— Patrick Suskind

“He had preserved the best part of her and made it his own: the principle of her scent.”

— Patrick Suskind

“He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and malice.”

— Patrick Suskind

This scent had a freshness, but not the freshness of limes or pomegranates, not the freshness of myrrh or cinnamon bark or curly mint or birch or camphor or pine needles, not that of a May rain or a frosty wind or of well water ... and at the same time it had warmth, but not as bergamot, cypress, or musk has, or jasmine or daffodils, not as rosewood has or iris ... This scent was a blend of both, of evanescence and substance, not a blend, but a unity, although slight and frail as well, and yet solid and sustaining, like a piece of thin, shimmering silk ... and yet again not like silk, but like pastry soaked in honey-sweet milk - and try as he would he couldn't fit those two together: milk and silk! This scent was inconceivable, indescribable, could not be categorized in any way - it really ought not to exist at all. And yet there it was as plain and splendid as day.

— Patrick Suskind

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

— Patrick Suskind

“Very well, but remember this ... I'll be looking at you when you're laid on the cross and the twelve blows are crashing down on your limbs. When the crowd is finally tired of your screams and wandered home, I will climb up through your blood and sit beside you. I will look deep into your eyes ... and drop by drop I will trickle my disgust into them like burning acid until ... finally ... you perish.”

— Patrick Suskind

“And because people are stupid and use their noses only for blowing, but believe absolutely anything they see with their eyes, they will say it is because this is a girl with beauty and grace and charm.”

— Patrick Suskind

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

— Patrick Suskind

“How quickly the apparently solidly laid foundation of one's existence could crumble.”

— Patrick Suskind

Moonlight knew no colors and traced the contours of the terrain only very softly. It covered the land a dirty gray, strangling life all night long. This world molded in lead, where nothing moved but the wind that fell sometimes like a shadow over the gray forests, and where nothing lived but the scent of the naked earth, was the only world he accepted, for it was much like the world of his soul.

— Patrick Suskind

He was not bound. No one led him by the arm. He got out of the carriage as if he were a free man.

— Patrick Suskind

“He would be able to create a scent that was not merely human, but super human, an angels scent, so indescribably good and vital that who ever smelt it would be enchanted and with his whole heart would have to love him.”

— Patrick Suskind

And finally - he was neither able nor willing to prevent it - the self-loathing dammed up inside him spilled over and gushed out, gushed out of glaring eyes that grew ever grimmer, angrier, beneath the rim of his cap, flooding the outside world as perfect, vulgar hate.

— Patrick Suskind

“Never before in his life had he known what happiness was. He knew at most some very rare states of numbed contentment. But now he was quivering with happiness and could not sleep for pure bliss. 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. but after today, he felt as if he finally knew who he really was: nothing less than a genius ... He had found the compass for his future life. And like all gifted abominations, for whom some external event makes straight the way down into the chaotic vortex of their souls, Grenouille never again departed from what he believed was the direction fate had pointed him ... He must become a creator of scents ... the greatest perfumer of all time.”

— Patrick Suskind

“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 he had to close his own eyes for a second to get out of it..”

— Patrick Suskind

He had a mighty urge to pull out his pistol and let loose in every directon, right into the coffeehouse, smack through it's glass windows, till there was nothing but crashing and tinkling, right into the middle of the ruck of cars or simply into the middle of one of the gigantic buildings across the way, those ugly, tall, menacing buildings, or into the air, straight up, into the heavens, yes, into the hot sky, into the horrible, oppressive, vaporous, pigeon blue-grey sky, bursting it, sending the leaden lid crashing with one shot, smashing down and pulverizing everything and burying it all, all of it, the whole miserable, dreary, loud, stinking world ...

— Patrick Suskind

“She had a face so
charming that visitors of all ages and both sexes would stand stockstill 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”

— Patrick Suskind

“Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself.”

— Patrick Suskind

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

— Patrick Suskind

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.

— Patrick Suskind

“He had to hold his body very still, very still, like some vessel about to slosh over from too much motion. Gradually he managed to get control of his breathing. His excited heart beat more steadily; the pounding of the waves inside him subsided slowly. And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusky reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened, and he entered. The next performance in the theatre of his soul was beginning.”

— Patrick Suskind

“He had used only a drop of his perfume for his performance in Grasse. There was enough left to enslave the whole world. If he wanted, he could be feted in Paris, not by tens of thousands, but by hundreds of thousands of people; or could walk out to Versailles and have the King kiss his feet; write the Pope a perfumed letter and reveal himself as the new Messiah; be anointed in Notre-Dame as Supreme Emperor before kings, or even as God come to earth.”

— Patrick Suskind

“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”

— Patrick Suskind

“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.”

— Patrick Suskind

“For here, inside the crypt, was where he truly lived. Which is to say, for well over twenty hours a day in total darkness and in total silence and in total immobility, he sat on his horse blanket at the end of the stony corridor, his back resting on the rock slide, his shoulders wedged between the rocks and enjoyed himself.”

— Patrick Suskind

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

— Patrick Suskind

“But perhaps we ask too much of him. Perhaps he really was only a god.”

— Patrick Suskind

“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.”

— Patrick Suskind

Grenouille's mother, however, perceived the odor neither of the fish nor of the corpses, for her sense of smell had been utterly dulled, besides which her belly hurt, and the pain deadened all susceptibility of sensate impressions.

— Patrick Suskind

“As he took possession of it, he was overcome by a sense of something like sacred awe. He carefully spread his horse blanket on the ground as if dressing an altar and lay down on it. He felt blessedly wonderful. He was lying a hundred and fifty feet below the earth, inside the loneliest mountain in France - as if in his own grave. Never in his life had he felt so secure, certainly not in his mother's belly. The world could go up on flames out there, but he would not even notice it here. He even began to cry softly. He did not know who to thank for such good fortune.”

— Patrick Suskind

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.

— Patrick Suskind

“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.”

— Patrick Suskind

“He was finally able to bask in his own existence; and he found it splendid.”

— Patrick Suskind

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

— Patrick Suskind

“The wind blew cold, and he was freezing, but he did not notice that he was freezing, for within him was a counterfrost, fear.”

— Patrick Suskind

“The smell of the sea pleased him so much that he wanted one day to take it in, pure and unadulterated, in such quantities that he could get drunk on it. And later, when he learned from stories how large the sea is and that you can sail upon it in ships fit days on end without ever seeing land, nothing pleased him more than the image of himself shutting high up in the crow's nest of the foremost mast on such ship, gliding on through the endless shell of the sea
which really was no smell, but a breath, an exhilaration of breath, the end of all smells
dissolving with pleasure in that breath.”

— Patrick Suskind

“Mrs. Porter was fat, and her breath smelled like burnt newspapers.”

— Patrick Suskind

“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”

— Patrick Suskind

How Miserable this God smelled! How ridiculously bad the scent that this God let spill from Him. It was not even genuine frankincense fuming out of those thuribles. A bad substitute, adulterated with linden and cinnamon dust and saltpeter. God stank. God was a poor little stinker. He had been swindled, this God had, or was Himself a swindler, no different from Grenouille-only a considerably worse one!

— Patrick Suskind

“This perfume was not like any perfume known before. It was not a scent that made things smell better ... it was completely new, capable of creating a whole world, a magical, rich world, and in an instant you forgot all the loathsomeness around you and felt so rich, so at ease, so free, so fine ...”

— Patrick Suskind

“As long as I don't have an idea, I won't write anything.”

— Patrick Suskind