"What had civilized man lost that he was looking for out there in jungles inhabited by Indians or Negroes?"

"All these grotesque incongruities between the richness of the world perceivable by smell and the poverty of language …"

"He disgusted them the way a fat spider that you can't bring yourself to crush with your own hand disgusts you."

"In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era tha…"

"The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The pe…"

"Their heads, up on top, at the back of the head, where the hair makes a cowlick...is where they smell best of all...O…"

"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."

"Man's misfortune stems from the fact that he does not want to stay in the room where he belongs."