Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Patrick Suskind
Top 10 Best Quotes
“He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.”
“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 He had withdrawn solely for his own pleasure, only to be near to himself.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.”
“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.”
“And he wallowed in disgust and loathing, and his hair stood on end at the delicious horror.”
“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.”
“Mrs. Porter was fat, and her breath smelled like burnt newspapers.”
“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.”
“...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!”
“The wind blew cold, and he was freezing, but he did not notice that he was freezing, for within him was a counterfrost, fear.”
Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves solely as promotional material for the aforementioned book. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.
Book Keywords:
refuge, odor, sea, loathing, torment, disgust, alone, hatred, breath, exhilaration, pleasure, solitude
