Jean-Dominique Bauby > Quotes

“The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

“I need to feel strongly, to love and admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

“If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

“Does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person’s true nature?”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby

“Once, I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

“Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby

“Want to play hangman? asks Theophile, and I ache to tell him that I have enough on my plate playing quadriplegic. But my communication system disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter. So the rule is to avoid impulsive sallies. It deprives conversation of its sparkle, all those gems you bat back and forth like a ball-and I count this forced lack of humor one of the great drawbacks of my condition.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

“Does the cosmos contain keys for opening my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? We must keep looking.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

“Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark . . . I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.
It will keep the vultures at bay.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

“The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

“Wir haben beide das Locked-In-Syndrom, jeder auf seine Weise, ich in meinem Gehause, er in seinem 3ten Stock”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby

“I skim through the issue [of Elle] and reach the offending photo, a montage that ridicules rather than glorifies our idol. It is one of the mysteries of our trade. You work for weeks on a subject, it goes back and forth among the most skillful pairs of hands, and no one spots the glaring blunder that a neophyte would spot in a second.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

“But I see in the clothes a symbol of continuing life. And proof that I still want to be myself. If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

“Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passing of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark... I hoard all these letters like treasure.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly