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He despised technical details, because details meant difficulties and difficulties meant ruffling his composure, and he simply would not put up with that.
An infant is not yet a human being; it is a prehuman being and does not yet possess a fully developed soul.
The child with no smell was smelling at him shamelessly, that was it! It was establishing his scent!
Whoever has survived his own birth in a garbage can is not so easily shoved back out of this world again.
For his soul he required nothing. Security, attention, tenderness, love—or whatever all those things are called that children are said to require—were totally dispensable for the young Grenouille.
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 if language made any sense at all; and he grew accustomed to using such words only when his contact with others made it absolutely necessary.
This scent was inconceivable, indescribable, could not be categorized in any way—it really ought not to exist at all.
Man’s misfortune stems from the fact that he does not want to stay in the room where he belongs.
Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor 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.
This world molded in lead, where nothing moved but the wind that fell sometimes like a shadow over the gray forests, and where nothing lived but the scent of the naked earth, was the only world that he accepted, for it was much like the world of his soul.
He wanted to acquire the human-being odor—if only in the form of an inferior temporary surrogate—that he did not possess himself. True, the odor of human being did not exist, any more than the human countenance.
For people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they could not escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath. Together with breath it entered human beings, who could not defend themselves against it, not if they wanted to live. And scent entered into their very core, went directly to their hearts, and decided for good and all between affection and contempt, disgust and lust, love and hate. He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.
It frightened him beyond measure to think that once he did possess the scent that he did not yet possess, he must inevitably lose it.
The murderer possessed exquisite taste. And he had a system. It was not just that all the murders had been carried out in the same efficient manner, but the very choice of victims betrayed intentions almost economical in their planning.
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.
