The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death

Nothing was missing, except me. I was elsewhere.

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

I placed myself at once under the protection of this brotherly symbol, guardian not just of sailors but of the sick—those castaways on the shores of loneliness.

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.