Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 26 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jean-Dominique Bauby.

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Famous Quotes By Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 1040209

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

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 1751154

I need to feel strongly, to love and admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 570671

Does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person's true nature? — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 659337

France was at peace; one couldn't shoot the bearers of bad news. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 354727

In that hothouse atmosphere, criminal records bloomed like orchids all around us. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 239723

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

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 1862802

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

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 404095

If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 798979

We thread our way through a moving forest of ice-cream cones and crimson thighs. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 1596886

In the past, it was known as a "massive stroke," and you simply died. But improved resuscitation techniques have now prolonged and refined the agony. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 1364824

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

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 2179012

Vincent had ten major ideas every week: three brilliant, five good, and two ridiculous. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 1750445

Once, I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 2034580

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

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 2073603

When I began a diet a week before my stroke, I never dreamed of such a dramatic result. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 2153804

My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 149325

I carefully read each letter myself. Some of them are serious in tone, discussing the meaning of life, invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence. And by a curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on these fundamental questions tend to be people I had known only superficially. Their small talk had masked hidden depths. Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person's true nature? Other — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 1185001

You can handle the wheelchair, said the occupational therapist, with a smile intended to make the remark sound like good news, whereas to my ears it had the ring of a life sentence. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 955099

What demon could have induced people to line a whole room with orange fabric? — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 931234

Yet I understood the poetry of such mind games one day when, attempting to ask for my glasses (lunettes), I was asked what I wanted to do with the moon (lune). — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 820112

Far from such din, when blessed silence returns, I can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head. To hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible. Loud breathing is enough to drown them out. This is astonishing: my hearing does not improve, yet I hear them better and better. I must have butterfly hearing. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 806082

The identity badge pinned to Sandrine's white tunic says "Speech Therapist," but it should read "Guardian Angel. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 739144

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

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 661928

I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory. — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 331629

Castaways on the shores of loneliness — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes 266461

I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours. But to keep my mind sharp, to avoid descending into resigned indifference, I maintain a level of resentment and anger, neither too much nor too little, just as a pressure cooker has a safety valve to keep it from exploding. — Jean-Dominique Bauby