Top 35 Jean-Dominique Bauby Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

2. “Once, I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

3. “Speech therapy is an art that deserves to be more widely known. You cannot imagine the acrobatics your tongue mechanically performs in order to produce all the sounds of a language.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

4. “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

5. “We thread our way through a moving forest of ice-cream cones and crimson thighs.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

6. “I need to feel strongly, to love and admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

7. “My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

8. “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

9. “Does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person’s true nature?”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

10. “Mysterious paradox: time, motionless here, gallops out there. In my contracted world, the hours drag on but the months flash by.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

11. “My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

12. “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

13. “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

14. “ESARINTULOMDPCFB VHGJQZYXKW.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

15. “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

16. “In that hothouse atmosphere, criminal records bloomed like orchids all around us.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

17. “Castaways on the shores of loneliness.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

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

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

19. “Vincent had ten major ideas every week: three brilliant, five good, and two ridiculous.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

20. “Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the glare of disaster to show a person’s true nature?”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

21. “Her purse is half open, and I see a hotel room key, a metro ticket, and a hundred-franc note folded in four, like objects brought back by a space probe sent to earth to study how earthlings live, travel, and trade with one another. The sight leaves me pensive and confused. Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? We must keep looking. I’ll be off now.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

22. “Under the physical therapist’s gaze, I am a Tour de France long shot on the verge of pulling off a record-setting victory. Success soothes my aching muscles. I am a phenomenal downhill skier. I can still hear the roar of the crowd on the slope and the singing of the wind in my ears. I was miles ahead of the favorites. I swear!”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

23. “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

24. “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. You survive, but you survive with what is so aptly known as ‘locked-in syndrome’.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

25. “France was at peace; one couldn’t shoot the bearers of bad news.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

26. “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 the rest.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

27. “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

28. “What demon could have induced people to line a whole room with orange fabric?”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

29. “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

30. “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.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

31. “Like the bath, my old clothes could easily bring back poignant, painful memories. But I see in the clothing 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

32. “Some evenings I have the impression that Grandpapa Noirtier patrols our corridors in a century-old wheelchair sadly in need of a drop of oil. To foil the decrees of fate, I am now planning a vast saga in which the key witness is not a paralytic but a runner. You never know. Perhaps it will work.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

33. “Ever since then, whenever I go through the main hall, I detect a hint of amusement in the empress’s smile.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

34. “And then one afternoon as I confided my woes to her likeness, an unknown face interposed itself between us. Reflected in the glass I saw the head of a man who seemed to have emerged from a vat of formaldehyde. His mouth was twisted, his nose damaged, his hair tousled, his gaze full of fear. One eye was sewn shut, the other goggled like the doomed eye of Cain. For a moment I stared at that dilated pupil, before I realized it was only mine.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

35. “Sometimes the phone interrupts our work, and I take advantage of Sandrine’s presence to be in touch with loved ones, to intercept and catch passing fragments of life, the way you catch a butterfly.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

36. “Wind begins to whip up the sand. The tide has gone out so far that swimmers look like tiny dots on the horizon. The children run to stretch their legs on the beach once more before leaving, and Sylvie and I remain alone and silent, her hand squeezing my inert fingers. Behind dark glasses that reflect a flawless sky, she softly weeps over our shattered lives.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

37. “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

38. “Crossword fans and Scrabble players have a head start.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

39. “At the outset of my protracted fast, deprivation sent me constantly to my imaginary larder. I was gluttonous.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby