Perfume Patrick Suskind Quotes

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.

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

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

And he wallowed in disgust and loathing, and his hair stood on end at the delicious horror.

We are familiar with people who seek out solitude: penitents, failures, saints, or prophets. They retreat to deserts, preferably, where they live on locusts and honey. Others, however, live in caves or cells on remote islands; some-more spectacularly-squat in cages mounted high atop poles swaying in the breeze. They do this to be nearer God. Their solitude is a self-moritification by which they do penance. They act in the belief that they are living a life pleasing to God. Or they wait months, years, for their solitude to be broken by some divine message that they hope then speedily to broadcast among mankind. Grenouille's case was nothing of the sort. There was not the least notion of God in his head. He was not doing penance or wating for some supernatural inspiration. He had withdrawn solely for his own pleasure, only to be near to himself. 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 lived in the wide world outside.

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.

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.

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

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.

إن الامتلاك والفقدان _كما بدا له _ كان أمراً مثيراً للرغبة، أكثر من رفضهما معاً بهذه الصورة المقتضبة . لقد رفض الكثير خلال حياته ، لكن لم يسبق له أن امتلك وفقد.

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

Besides which, he was a man who did not let his decisions be made for him by other people, not by a crowd thrown into panic, and certainly not by some anonymous piece of criminal trash.

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. There is no remedy for it.

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 for days on end without ever seeing land, nothing pleased him more than the image of himself sitting high up in the crow's nest of the foremost mast on such a ship, gliding on through the endless smell 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.

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.

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.

He preferred not to meddle with such problems, they were too discomfiting for him and would only land him in the most agonizing insecurity and disquiet, whereas to make use of one's reason one truly needed both security and quiet.

Grenouille se asustó¿Y si esta fragancia que voy a poseer...---se dijo--- desaparece? No es como en el recuerdo donde todos los perfumes son imperecederos. El perfume real se desvanece en el mundo; es volátil. Y cuando se gaste, desaparecerá el manantial de donde lo he capturado y yo estaré desnudo como antes y tendré que conformarme con mis sucedáneos. ¡No será peor que antes! Porque ahora entretanto habré conocido y poseído mi propia magnífica fragancia y jamás podré olvidarla, ya que jamás olvido un aroma, y durante toda la vida me consumirá su recuerdo como me consume ahora, en este mismo momento, la idea de que llegaré a poseerlo... ¿Para qué lo necesito,entonces?

These Diderots and d'Alemberts and Voltaires and Rousseaus or whatever names these scribblers have - there are even clerics among them and gentleman of noble birth! - they've 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!

...his sleep, though deep as death itself, was not dreamless this time, but threaded with ghostly wisps of dreams. These wisps were clearly recognizable as scraps of odors. At first they merely floated in thin threads past Grenouille's nose, but then they grew thicker, more cloudlike. And now it seemed as if he were standing in the middle of a moor from which fog was rising. The fog slowly climbed higher. Soon Grenouille was completely wrapped in fog, saturated with fog, and it seemed he could not get his breath for the foggy vapor. If he did not want to suffocate, he would have to breathe the fog in. And the fog was, as noted, an odor. And Grenouille knew what kind of odor. The fog ws his own odor. His, Grenouille's, own body odor was the fog. And the awful thing was that Grenouille, although he knew that his odor was his odor, could not smell it. Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself!

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.

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.

He worked without pause for two hours - with increasingly hectic movements, increasingly slipshod scribblings of his pen on the paper, and increasingly large doses of perfume sprinkled on to his handkerchief and held to his nose. He could hardly smell anything now, the volatile substances he was inhaling had long since drugged him; he could no longer recognize what he thought had been established beyond doubt at the start of his analysis. He knew that it was pointless to continue smelling. he would never ascertain the ingredients of this new-fangled perfume, certainly not today, nor tomorrow either, when his nose would have recovered, God willing. He had never learned fractionary smelling. Dissecting scents, fragmenting a unity, whether well or not-so-well blended, into its simple components, was a wretched, loathsome business. It did not interest him.

We shall smell it. Just as a sharp axe can split a log into tiny splinters, our nose will fragment every detail of this perfume, Amor and Psyche. And then it will be only too apparent that this ostensibly magical sent was created by the most ordinary, familiar methods. We, Baldini, perfumer, shall catch Pélissier, the vinegar man, at his tricks. We shall rip the mask from his ugly face and show the innovator just what the old craft is capable of. We'll scrupulously imitate his mixture, his fashionable perfume. It will be born anew in our hands, so perfectly copied that the humbug himself won't be able to tell it from his own. No! That's not enough! We shall improve it! We'll show up his mistakes and rinse them away and then rub his nose in it. You're a bungler, Pélissier! An old stinker is what you are! An upstart in the craft of perfumery, and nothing more. And now to work, Baldini! Sharpen your nose and smell without sentimentality! Dissect the scent by the rules of the art! You must have the formula by this evening! And he made a dive for his desk, grabbing paper, ink and a fresh handkerchief, laid it all out properly, and began his analysis. The procedure was this: to dip the handkerchief in perfume, pass it rapidly under his nose, and extract from the fleeting cloud of scent one or another of its ingredients without being significantly distracted by the complex blending of its other parts; then, holding the handkerchief at the end of his outstretched arm, to jot down the name of the ingredient he had discovered, and repeat the process at once, letting the handkerchief flit by his nose, snatching at the next fragment of sent, and so on...

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. (Chapter 51, Part 4)