Patrick Süskind Quotes
born 1949 Germany
Patrick Süskind (born 26 March 1949) is a German writer and screenwriter, known best for his novel
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51 quotes
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.
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.
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.
He did not want to have his newfound respiratory freedom ruined so soon be the sultry climate of humans.
What had civilized man lost that he was looking for out there in jungles inhabited by Indians or Negroes?
He was so full of disgust, disgust at the world and at himself, that he could not weep.
He had no use for sensual gratification, unless that gratification consisted of pure, incorporeal odors.
Whatever came within his field of vision Jonathan coated with the vile patina of his hate.
He felt only the sentiment that is generally termed tolerance: a very lukewarm emotional stew of disgust, contempt, and sympathy.
He had found his way to sphinxlike imperturbability.
God stank. God was a poor little stinker.
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.
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.
A guard was like a sphinx. He functioned not by some deed, but rather by his mere bodily presence.
He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.
He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!
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.
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.
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.
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.