Jean Dominique Quotes & Sayings

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

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

It takes 25 years to learn to draw, one hour to learn to paint. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

The way good inventions are made is to familiarize yourself with those of others. The men who cultivate letters and the arts are all sons of Homer. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

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

Drawing includes three and a half quarters of the content of painting ... Drawing contains everything, except the hue — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

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

In that hothouse atmosphere, criminal records bloomed like orchids all around us. — 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 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

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

You have to observe flowers in order to find the right tones for the folds of clothes. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

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

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

The exhibition has now become no more than a bazaar where mediocrity spreads itself out with impudence. The exhibitions are useless and dangerous ... they ought to be abolished. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

What do these so-called artists mean when they preach the discovery of the'new'? Is there anything new? Everything has been done, everything has been discovered. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

A painter can turn pennies into gold, for all subjects are capable of being transformed into poems. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Fine and delicate taste is the fruit of education and experience. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Drawing is the probity of art. To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, the modeling. See what remains after that. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Drawing is the honesty of art. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

The chief consideration for a good painter is to think out the whole of his picture, to have it in his head as a whole ... so that he may then execute it with warmth and as if the entire thing were done at the same time. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is true color, there is nature without exaggeration, without forced brilliance! He is exact. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Better gray than garishness. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

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

Is there anyone among the great men who has not imitated? Nothing is made with nothing. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Castaways on the shores of loneliness — Jean-Dominique Bauby

Draw lines - draw a lot of lines — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Muscles I know; they are my friends. But I have forgotten their names. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

To draw does not simply mean to reproduce contours; the drawing does not simply consist in the idea: the drawing is even the expression, the interior form, the plan, the model. Look what remains after that! The drawing is three fourths and a half of what constitutes painting. If I had to put a sign over my door to the atelier, I would write: School of drawing, and I'm certain that I would create painters. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

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

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

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

Do not concern yourself with other people. Concern yourself with your own work alone. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

As long as you do not hold a balance between your seeing of things and your execution, you will do nothing that is really good. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

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

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

Make copies, young man, many copies. You can only become a good artist by copying the masters. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

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