Sara Baume Quotes

People don't like it when you say real things.

I know with unqualified certainty that I want to die. But I also know with equivalent certainty that I won't do anything about it. That I will only remain here and wait for death to indulge me.

This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins.

This morning, the sun endures past dawn. I realise that it is August: the summer's last stand.

What bothered me was all of the time he wasted by drumming, and all the time I wasted by listening to him drum, by taking pleasure in it, for pleasure is almost always a waste of time.

Sometimes things happen that give me cause to believe I no longer exist. Car park barriers which do not lift when I drive towards them, automatic doors which do not open automatically as I approach.

And out the bus window, here is my dead world come true, my whole dead world in motion.

But now I remember, of course, I'm never going to be old.

I think: by the time I'm old, nobody will be able to die any more.

In the days approaching Christmas, she always reminds me of the previous year: 'Jane crocheted you an entire poncho, and all you gave her was a bone-shaped beach stone.

I wish I'd been born with your capacity for wonder. I wouldn't mind living a shorter life if my short life could be as vivid as yours.

But nowadays I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy.

But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.

Did it do me any good, early in life, to believe so many things which were not true? Or did it damage me? Pouring a foundation of disappointment, of uncertainty.

I look at the cake in my mother's arms and think: here stands the only person in the whole world who'd go to such trouble for fractious, ungrateful me.

Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?

No matter how far I try to travel from people, people always appear. Either they follow me, or they're already there, and I followed them, unwittingly.

But no, now I see I never meant to Ben what Ben meant to me. If there was anything I said which resonated in return, he found a better speech elsewhere. My romance went no further than his coat.

And I felt like such a failure. I thought: I can't even do mental illness properly.

It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.

See how community is only a good thing when you're a part of it.

My mother says: 'People who suffer from anxiety are usually those with the most vivid imaginations.

I decided that if I didn't allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn't have to wake up again and despair.

I see foxes often, but always they are crossing fallow fields in the distance. Gold flecks on faraway expanses of green. Magnetic to the meandering eye. Enigmatic, unreachable.

Blending into the tinctures and textures of the countryside. The tree which falls without any human hearing still falls, as the creatures who die without being found by a human still die.

I was wrong to try and impose something of my humanity on you, when being human never did me any good

Art, and sadness, which last forever.

Now I wonder if each artwork is in fact utterly inaccessible to everybody but the person to whom it is secretly addressed?

I love that an idea can be so powerful it doesn't matter whether I've seen the artwork for real or not.

How easy to be electrocuted. How fine the line between beauty and peril.

In the face of immense tragedy—yet again—unexpected beauty.