Jean-Dominique Bauby quotes:

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.

If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.

Does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person's true nature?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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