"Since taking up life in my cocoon, I have made two brief trips to the world of Paris medicine to hear the verdict pronounced on me from medical heights. I shed a few tears as we passed the corner cafe where I used to drop in for a bite. I can weep discreetly, yet the professionals think my eye is watering.' How many people in this state in enclosed half-lit hospital beds are never stimulated, never recognised as people with intact minds who can still contribute if only their talents are acknowledged?"
Assoc. Prof. Roger Rees: "Isn't Bauby justified in being indignant and hurt about a prognosis that classifies him as a vegetable, or that holds the view that only a visit to Lourdes and a subsequent miracle cure could save him? Having read Bauby's book, we now recognise that he is a unique person whose mind and being still needs to feel strongly, to love and admire just as desperately as he needs to breathe."
"From an economic rationalist's view of rehabilitation or of a simplistic absolute view that a person is either cured or not cured, people in the locked-in state are considered of no account. There is a young woman in an Adelaide hospital who now uses a large felt-tipped pen to write notes and letters about the poetry of Eliott and Whitman, the prose of Jane Austen, or record her feelings about Mozart's music. She has been in a locked-in state for six years, swaddled like a newborn, unable to move or speak unaided, often experiencing a total lapse into infancy. Yet in these six years her mind has remained intact, eager to emerge when the appropriate time arrived. Her parents have maintained a six-year vigil, believing that an intact person still existed in their daughter's paralysed body. She still cannot speak, but her writings now invoke the supremacy of her memory, dreams, reasoning and imaginings."
"There is now a curious reversal of views by those who believed that her brain damage was global and total. Her parents are surely vindicated as their daughter's meticulous writings spread before our eyes, and along with [Jean-Dominique] Bauby, they provide evidence of the mystery of human resilience and the duality of the interaction of the brain and the mind."