"The established characters are easy to recall. I don't know why, but they come back to me instantly when I need them. It's the one-time-only characters that I don't remember where the voice I used came from."

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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