Suskind Quotes & Sayings

When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love. — Patrick Suskind

It is one thing to rouse the passion of a people, and quite another to lead them. — Ron Suskind

The United States, the President said, "must be a force for good." Americans focused on "good." Much of the world focused on "force," on being handled. — Ron Suskind

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. — Patrick Suskind

These were lobbyists - many of them compensated quite handsomely not to react as human beings. — Ron Suskind

And now fear spread over the countryside. People no longer knew against whom
to direct their impotent rage. — Patrick Suskind

The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen. — Ron Suskind

... in that moment, as he saw and smelled how irresistible its effect was and how with lightning speed it spread and made captives of the people all around him - in that moment his whole disgust for humankind rose up again within him and completely soured his triumph, so that he felt not only no joy, but not even the least bit of satisfaction. What he had always longed for - that other people should love him - became at the moment of his achievement unbearable, because he did not love them himself, he hated them. And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred - in hating and in being hated. — Patrick Suskind

It's exciting to work with the kids so devoid of irony, so unguarded. And also terrifying. — Ron Suskind

She was indeed a girl of exquisite beauty. She was one of those languid women made of dark honey smooth and sweet and terribly sticky. — Patrick Suskind

God gives good times and bad times, but He does not wish us to bemoan and bewail the bad times, but to prove ourselves men. — Patrick Suskind

An exchange student from Afghanistan "finds himself in the midst of America's circus of self-invention" as he experiences Halloween for the first time. His hosts bauble, "It's the greatest of holidays when you can become anything you want. — Ron Suskind

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? — Ron Suskind

He disgusted them the way a fat spider that you can't bring yourslef to crush in your own hand disgusts you. — Patrick Suskind

For any thinking person, it (perpetual happiness) is untenable. If you're a thinking person, your upbeat sometimes, said sometimes. — Ron Suskind

You try to hold on to some notions you might have had before, that this will somehow work out, this is a spell that will lift or be broken. — Ron Suskind

Summers was simply a master explainer, able to deftly boil down the complexities of economic and financial, and to put them in terms the non-expert could understand. He was brilliant at cultivating a sense of control, even as events spun far beyond what could be managed with any certainty. He could will into being the confidence that eluded others, those less self-assured and, maybe sensibly, on humbler terms with the world. — Ron Suskind

Many years later, a psychiatrist friend of mine said something to us. He said, "Respect denial." It's a powerful force. — Ron Suskind

He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world! — Patrick Suskind

A boy, if he's lucky, discovers his limitations across a leisurely passage of years, with a self-awareness arriving slowly. That way, at least he has plenty of time to heroically imagine himself first. Most boys unfold in this natural, measured way, growing up with at least one adult on the scene who can convincingly fake being all-powerful, omniscient, and unfailingly protective for a kid's first decade or so, providing an invaluable canopy of reachable stars and monsters that are comfortably make-believe. — Ron Suskind

The wind blew cold, and he was freezing, but he did not notice that he was freezing, for within him was a counterfrost, fear. — Patrick Suskind

By virtue of some of the ways the game is played, in terms of message discipline, in terms of access for reporters, and especially in the way that sources and subjects, especially famous subjects, treat the media, almost by default there's more news that's falling into books. — Ron Suskind

Reaching out to any fellow ghetto kids is an act he puts in the same category as doing drugs: the initial rush of warmth and euphoria puts you on a path to ruin. — Ron Suskind

He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid. — Patrick Suskind

A sense of messianic purpose makes the national interest almost indistinguishable from the political interests of the president. — Ron Suskind

Bathed in sweat and trembling with agitation, no,
not with agitation, but with fear, for he finally admitted it to himself: it was naked fear
that had seized him, and in admitting it he grew calmer and his thoughts clearer — Patrick Suskind

The media has become more forceful, has begun to recognize its traditional historic role and act on it, and truth is infectious. — Ron Suskind

I absolutely reject that idea that the press is liberal and what it does is liberal. In my view, it's like accusing a doctor of malpractice or a lawyer of malfeasance. — Ron Suskind

If you write something that gets a bad response, or someone commits candor or is off message, there are often consequences almost immediately when it appears in the paper or a magazine, that somebody gets called into the boss's office. And sometimes it can result in a loss of access for the reporter. — Ron Suskind

He looks as if he were three or four; looks just like one of those unapproachable, incomprehensible, willful little prehuman creatures, who in their ostensible innocence think only of themselves, who want to subordinate the whole world to their despotic will, and would do it, too, if one let them pursue their megalomaniacal ways and did not apply the strictest pedagogical principles to guide them to a disciplined, self-controlled, fully human existence. — Patrick Suskind

Once they arrive, affirmative action kids are generally left to sink or swim academically. Brown (University) offers plenty of counseling and tutoring to struggling students, but, as any academic Dean will tell you, it's up to the students to seek it out, something that a drowning minority student will seek to avoid at all costs, fearing it will trumpet a second-class status. — Ron Suskind

And he wallowed in disgust and loathing, and his hair stood on end at the delicious horror. — Patrick Suskind

The fact is, most journalists I know are not particularly political. They move around a lot. — Ron Suskind

I'm [Paul O'Neill] an old guy, and I'm rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me. — Ron Suskind

Trust is something you have to practice. Someday you're going to fall in love with someone, and you need to understand what trust is all about. What you doing now is developing bad practices of betraying people's trust. — Ron Suskind

Ignorance is the only possible happiness this world has to offer — Patrick Suskind

Islam is in a formative period struggling to consolidate the vast reach won by both inspiration and force at its founding. Two centuries along, the faith of Muhammad hangs like an intricate veil: a religion still searching for institutional wholeness, a set of lessons to live by. — Ron Suskind

The whole game was about confidence, as it always was. Everything was fine - until it wasn't. — Ron Suskind

How Miserable this God smelled! How ridiculously bad the scent that this God let spill from Him. It was not even genuine frankincense fuming out of those thuribles. A bad substitute, adulterated with linden and cinnamon dust and saltpeter. God stank. God was a poor little stinker. He had been swindled, this God had, or was Himself a swindler, no different from Grenouille-only a considerably worse one! — Patrick Suskind

And because people are stupid and use their noses only for blowing, but believe absolutely anything they see with their eyes, they will say it is because this is a girl with beauty and grace and charm. — Patrick Suskind

He is now judging himself, harshly, by his captors' rules. — Ron Suskind

All of the leading terrorism experts are clear on one thing: that in terms of protecting America, we are almost never going to know a place or a time of an attack. — Ron Suskind

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

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. — Patrick Suskind

Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself. — Patrick Suskind

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 wide world outside. — Patrick Suskind

You are livin'," she says in feigned exasperation. "You just don't see what I see. You got something special. Something you got from your ma. It's a thing. I mean, I wish I had it. It's this thing where you know what it's going to take, and then you get it done. You push yourself and you get there. — Ron Suskind

In his book The Soul of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois writes about always feeling his twoness
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; to warring ideals in one dark body. — Ron Suskind

But perhaps we ask too much of him. Perhaps he really was only a god. — Patrick Suskind

Never before in his life had he known what happiness was. He knew at most some very rare states of numbed contentment. But now he was quivering with happiness and could not sleep for pure bliss. It was as if he had been born a second time; no, not a second time, the first time, for until now he had merely existed like an animal with a most nebulous self-awareness. but after today, he felt as if he finally knew who he really was: nothing less than a genius ... He had found the compass for his future life. And like all gifted abominations, for whom some external event makes straight the way down into the chaotic vortex of their souls, Grenouille never again departed from what he believed was the direction fate had pointed him ... He must become a creator of scents ... the greatest perfumer of all time. — Patrick Suskind

Al-Qaeda has a kind of loose, almost entrepreneurial structure with lots of cells in various countries that are semi-independent. — Ron Suskind

He no longer yearned for his life in the cave. He had experienced that life once and it had proved unlivable. Just as had his other experience - life among human beings. He was suffocated by both worlds. He no longer wanted to live at all. — Patrick Suskind

He came to the conclusion that you cannot depend on people, and that you can live in peace only if you keep them at arm's length. — Patrick Suskind

He had used only a drop of his perfume for his performance in Grasse. There was enough left to enslave the whole world. If he wanted, he could be feted in Paris, not by tens of thousands, but by hundreds of thousands of people; or could walk out to Versailles and have the King kiss his feet; write the Pope a perfumed letter and reveal himself as the new Messiah; be anointed in Notre-Dame as Supreme Emperor before kings, or even as God come to earth. — Patrick Suskind

If you happened to be born on third base, you didn't rub it in the face of the guy who wasn't even born in the stadium. Self-interest was generally checked at the door with your coat and hat. — Ron Suskind

She was one of those languid women, made of dark honey, smooth and sweet, and terribly sticky, who take control of a room with a syrupy gesture, a toss of the hair, a single slow whiplash of the eyes - and all the while remain as still as the centre of a hurricane, apparently unaware of the force of gravity by which they irresistibly attract themselves the yearnings and the souls of both men and women. — Patrick Suskind

The problems afflicting a nation are always in equal measure spiritual crises. — Ron Suskind

There was only one thing the perfume could not do. It could not turn him into a person who could love and be loved like everyone else. So, to hell with it he thought. To hell with the world. With the perfume. With himself — Patrick Suskind

A Pakistani exchange student's maternal American host "managed to summon the transforming question of her culture, built on the revolutionary idea that people are the sovereign, the boss, captains of their own fate.
She said, simply, "But what do YOU think? — Ron Suskind

Message matters. Message matters almost as much as actions. — Ron Suskind

He had a mighty urge to pull out his pistol and let loose in every directon, right into the coffeehouse, smack through it's glass windows, till there was nothing but crashing and tinkling, right into the middle of the ruck of cars or simply into the middle of one of the gigantic buildings across the way, those ugly, tall, menacing buildings, or into the air, straight up, into the heavens, yes, into the hot sky, into the horrible, oppressive, vaporous, pigeon blue-grey sky, bursting it, sending the leaden lid crashing with one shot, smashing down and pulverizing everything and burying it all, all of it, the whole miserable, dreary, loud, stinking world ... — Patrick Suskind

As he began to withdraw from them, it became clear to Grenouille for the first time that for eighteen years 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. You could live, so it seemed, in this world, in this world devoid of humanity. On — Patrick Suskind

I'm more depressed about the realities of the mature bureaucracy and more excited about the ideal that we're fighting for. And the juxtaposition has obvious consequences. Rolf Mowatt-Larrsen — Ron Suskind

He did not want to have his newfound respiratory freedom ruined so soon be the sultry climate of humans. — Patrick Suskind

But he did decide vegetatively, as a bean when once tossed aside must decide if it ought to germinate or had better let things be. — Patrick Suskind

Confidence is the immaterial residue of material actions. Confidence is the public face of competence. — Ron Suskind

Hebrews 11:1," says Mr. Taylor. "The substance of faith is a hope in the unseen." "NO. Wrong-you messed it!" Cedric laughs. "It goes: 'Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.' Man, Mr. Taylor, you always getting 'em wrong." Mr. Taylor howls, "All right, extra point for you," but, as usual, he wrestles the boy back to middle ground, thwarting an outright victory, "The Word, of course, is the Word my young friend. But make it into what's right for you. That's the lesson for today. Take from the Holy Scripture only what you need, nothing more. — Ron Suskind

That's not the part that gnaws at Rolf. It's the last part, where Ezekiel says that if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet to warn the people and the sword comes and takes the life of one of them ... I will hold the watchman accountable for his blood. — Ron Suskind

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 fit days on end without ever seeing land, nothing pleased him more than the image of himself shutting high up in the crow's nest of the foremost mast on such ship, gliding on through the endless shell 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. — Patrick Suskind

He (Larry Summers) can frame arguments with such force and conviction that people think he knows more than he does. — Ron Suskind

From his youth on , he had been accustomed to people's passing him and taking no notice of him whatever , not out contempt -as hehad once believed - But because they were quite unaware of his existence. There was no space surrounding him, no waves broke from him into the atmosphere, as with other people; he had no shadow, so to speak, to cast across another's face. Only if he ran right into someone in a crowd or in a street-corner collision would there be a brief moment of discernment; and th person en countered would bounce off and stare at him for a few seconds as if gazing at a creature that ought not even exist, a creature that, although undeniably there, in some way or other was not present- and would take to his heels and have forgotten him, Grenouille, a moment later ....... — Patrick Suskind

Moonlight knew no colors and traced the contours of the terrain only very softly. It covered the land a dirty gray, strangling life all night long. 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 he accepted, for it was much like the world of his soul. — Patrick Suskind

Author describes auto CEO's decisions to drive rather than fly to Washington as "showy penitence". — Ron Suskind

Necessity and desperation birth resourcefulness. — Ron Suskind

A lawyer's empathy for her client deepens when she realizes that she has only seen the last couple of phases of his decline. How hard it must his initial adjustment have been to his loss of freedom? — Ron Suskind

Grenouille's mother, however, perceived the odor neither of the fish nor of the corpses, for her sense of smell had been utterly dulled, besides which her belly hurt, and the pain deadened all susceptibility of sensate impressions. — Patrick Suskind

As he took possession of it, he was overcome by a sense of something like sacred awe. He carefully spread his horse blanket on the ground as if dressing an altar and lay down on it. He felt blessedly wonderful. He was lying a hundred and fifty feet below the earth, inside the loneliest mountain in France - as if in his own grave. Never in his life had he felt so secure, certainly not in his mother's belly. The world could go up on flames out there, but he would not even notice it here. He even began to cry softly. He did not know who to thank for such good fortune. — Patrick Suskind

For Grenouille, this simplicity seemed a deliverance. — Patrick Suskind

Wars tend to be very public things, they are visible. There are correspondents traveling with the troops and you get daily dispatches. — Ron Suskind

Security is by far the city's predominant business. — Ron Suskind

He possessed the power. He held it in his hand. 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. There was only one thing that power could not do: it could not make him able to smell himself. — Patrick Suskind

In one hour, the highest SES children heard an average of two thousand words, while children of welfare families heard about six hundred. Differences in parental responses to children were also striking. Highest SES parents responded to their children about 250 times per hour; lowest SES parents responded to their children fewer than 50 times in the same period. But the most significant and most concerning difference? Verbal approval. Children in the highest SES heard about forty expressions of verbal approval per hour. Children in welfare homes, about four. — Dana Suskind

If we want to discuss love, which after all we believe is something very special, it is not much help for someone to explain that it represents a universal basic principle governing the tides and the digestive system alike. He might as well tell us that death is a thermodynamic phenomenon affecting both the amoeba and a black hole in the constellation of Pegasus - and he would still have told us nothing. — Patrick Suskind

As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter - an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn't feel trustworthy. Sometimes it's a quote or incident that's too perfect - a feeling I always had when reading stories by Stephen Glass in the New Republic. Sometimes it's too many errors of fact, the overuse of anonymous sources, or signs that a reporter hasn't dealt fairly with people or evidence. And sometimes it's a combination of flaws that produces a ring of falsity, the whiff of a bad egg. There's no journalist who sets off my bullshit alarm like Ron Suskind. — Jacob Weisberg

Every person has their pantheon - the Bible, Hollywood, Shakespeare - their way of understanding the world. — Ron Suskind

We are reformers in the spring, but iin autumn we stand by the old. Ralph Waldo Emerson — Ron Suskind

Religions find lasting utility in terms of prescription or parameter, rules for the conduct of human affairs. — Ron Suskind

No human being can go on living in the same house with a pigeon, a pigeon is the epitomy of chaos and anarchy, a pigeon that whizzes around unpredictably, that sets it's claws in you, picks at your eyes.. — Patrick Suskind

Two hours a day for two days per week. Four hours. At $7.25 an hour, that gave him a gross income of $29 a week. He is also now a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers International, the union that represents food workers, retail clerks, and farm workers. His monthly dues for the UFCW are $25, all taken out of his first week's check. That makes Owen arguably the most selfless labor activist in America, with 86 percent of his pay going to support his union. — Ron Suskind

Very well, but remember this ... I'll be looking at you when you're laid on the cross and the twelve blows are crashing down on your limbs. When the crowd is finally tired of your screams and wandered home, I will climb up through your blood and sit beside you. I will look deep into your eyes ... and drop by drop I will trickle my disgust into them like burning acid until ... finally ... you perish. — Patrick Suskind

The informed, unmanaged question. That's the most dangerous thing at a press conference anywhere. — Ron Suskind

The fact is, I can vote for anybody; independents, Republicans, Democrats. But I'm a registered Democrat in the District of Columbia. — Ron Suskind

Mrs. Porter was fat, and her breath smelled like burnt newspapers. — Patrick Suskind

This perfume was not like any perfume known before. It was not a scent that made things smell better ... it was completely new, capable of creating a whole world, a magical, rich world, and in an instant you forgot all the loathsomeness around you and felt so rich, so at ease, so free, so fine ... — Patrick Suskind

And finally - he was neither able nor willing to prevent it - the self-loathing dammed up inside him spilled over and gushed out, gushed out of glaring eyes that grew ever grimmer, angrier, beneath the rim of his cap, flooding the outside world as perfect, vulgar hate. — Patrick Suskind

The government of the world's most powerful nation is running furiously in place. — Ron Suskind

The idea that our son would be like Raymond Babbitt was a shocking reordering of everything. And something we couldn't quite fathom, really. — Ron Suskind

The fact is that in a way, journalists become a kind of default in the system when you don't have substantive two-party back-and-forth inside of the government. — Ron Suskind

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating new realities ... we're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. — Ron Suskind

He was finally able to bask in his own existence; and he found it splendid. — Patrick Suskind