Biography
"And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusty reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened and he entered. The next performance in the theater of Grenouille's soul was beginning."
"In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages."
"The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter."
"Their heads, up on top, at the back of the head, where the hair makes a cowlick...is where they smell best of all...Once you've smelled them there, you love them whether they’re your own or somebody else's."
"The odour of humans is always a fleshly odour—that is, a sinful odour."
"He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and malice."
"Whoever has survived his own birth on a rubbish heap is not so easily shoved back out of this world again."
"He disgusted them the way a fat spider that you can't bring yourself to crush with your own hand disgusts you."
"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."
"Erfindung war ihm sehr suspekt, denn sie bedeutete immer den Bruch einer Regel."
"What had civilized man lost that he was looking for out there in jungles inhabited by Indians or Negroes?"
"Man's misfortune stems from the fact that he does not want to stay in the room where he belongs."
"These Diderots and d'Alemberts and Voltaires and Rousseaus...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!"
"Constantly before his eyes now was a river flowing from him; and it was as if he himself and his house and the wealth he had accumulated over many decades were flowing away like the river, while he was too old and too weak to oppose the powerful current."
"The river ... glittered now here, now there, moving ever closer, as if a giant hand were scattering millions of louis-d'or over the water. For a moment it seemed the direction of the river had changed: it was flowing toward Baldini, a shimmering flood of pure gold."
"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."
"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."
"Naturally, the gnome had everything to do with it."
"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."
"He did not want to have his newfound respiratory freedom ruined so soon be the sultry climate of humans."
"Grenouille no longer wanted to go somewhere, but only to go away, away from human beings."
"He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!"
"He had no use for sensual gratification, unless that gratification consisted of pure, incorporeal odors."
"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."