Patrick Süskind

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 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.