Sara Baume Quotes
Sara Baume is a critically acclaimed Irish novelist and artist who has been praised for her lyrical prose and poignant storytelling. Her work often delves into the struggles of those who are marginalized or misunderstood, offering readers a unique and compassionate perspective on the world, and on the creative process. Here are some of the best quotes from Sara Baume that will be sure to inspire and enlighten you.
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Appreciate the people around you. Don’t replump their pillows until they return safely in the evening.
Sara Baume -
This morning, the sun endures past dawn. I realise that it is August: the summer’s last stand.
Sara Baume -
My only chance is to pretend it’s a day like any other; to keep the despair only as great as on all the others.
Sara Baume -
I never went downstairs to join my housemates around the television. I cooked dinner later than everyone else and carried the plate up to my bedroom. I knew they must have thought me aloof, or a little bit eccentric, or maybe even unkind, but I didn’t care. Once the kitchen door swung shut behind me, I was alone, and so everything was okay.
Sara Baume -
My sadness isn’t a way I feel but a thing trapped inside the walls of my flesh, like a smog. It takes the sheen off everything. It rolls the world in soot. It saps the power from my limbs and presses my back into a stoop.
Sara Baume -
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.
Sara Baume -
I realise that you were not born with a predetermined capacity for wonder, as I’d believed. I realise that you fed it up yourself from tiny pieces of the world. I realise it’s up to me to follow your example and nurture my own wonder, morsel by morsel by morsel.
Sara Baume -
It’s only now you’re gone I see how you’re my reason for doing things. Now I’m a stiltwalker with the stilts removed. My emptied trouser legs flap in the wind and I can’t remember how to walk without being precipitously propped.
Sara Baume -
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.
Sara Baume -
I tried to think of a vice I want to sacrifice, and ended up reasoning that I need my bad habits, desperately, just to coax myself through each day.
Sara Baume -
It happens so seldom; I must catch and keep this slender yearning, a rare beetle in a jam-jar trap. But mustering will is not the same as wanting. I lie in the garden and think about all the footsteps between my body on the grass and my pencil-case and notebook on the table in the sun room. All the muscles I have to flex and relax to get myself there.
Sara Baume -
See how community is only a good thing when you’re a part of it.
Sara Baume -
My phone doesn’t ring and the doorbell doesn’t either and I begin to wonder whether I am still alive.
Sara Baume -
I don’t want to say hello, nor do I want him to know that I’ve seen him and failed to say hello.
Sara Baume -
But I know I will do neither; nothing. I have all the time in the world, and yet, I can’t be bothered.
Sara Baume -
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.
Sara Baume -
People don’t like it when you say real things.
Sara Baume
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I tried to think of a vice I want to sacrifice, and ended up reasoning that I need my bad habits, desperately, just to coax myself through each day.
Sara Baume -
It happens so seldom; I must catch and keep this slender yearning, a rare beetle in a jam-jar trap. But mustering will is not the same as wanting. I lie in the garden and think about all the footsteps between my body on the grass and my pencil-case and notebook on the table in the sun room. All the muscles I have to flex and relax to get myself there.
Sara Baume -
See how community is only a good thing when you’re a part of it.
Sara Baume -
I can’t remember the name of the piece, or the artist. Maybe it wasn’t even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behavior is an act of performance.
Sara Baume -
And I wonder if any of the road-kill creatures actually wanted to die and threw themselves beneath the speeding wheels. A lethargic swallow who couldn’t bear the prospect of flying all the way back to Africa again. An insomniac hedgehog who couldn’t stand the thought of lying awake all winter with no one to talk to.
Sara Baume -
But with summer comes hope, and with hope comes disappointment.
Sara Baume -
See the bird walk, the information board, the noble fir in all its hollow frippery. See the takeaway, the chip shop. The pub, the other pub. The grocer’s and the hairdressing salon, all shut. See the community we were insidiously hounded from. See how community is only a good thing when you’re a part of it.
Sara Baume -
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.
Sara Baume -
Life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us, I think. Life likes to tell us it told us so.
Sara Baume -
I’m afraid of losing you, I never expected I could be so stupidly afraid of losing you.
Sara Baume -
I knew precisely what things I wanted to do – and when and why – and I was deeply resentful of other people’s attempts to enforce structure on my days.
Sara Baume -
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.
Sara Baume -
But it’s too late, I’m sorry. Now I have no idea how things begin, nor how to know that they are safe, nor how to show strangers we are safe too.
Sara Baume -
What did I use to do all day without you? Already I can’t remember.
Sara Baume -
I believe: I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone.
Sara Baume -
I decided that if I didn’t allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn’t have to wake up again and despair.
Sara Baume
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I’m afraid of losing you, I never expected I could be so stupidly afraid of losing you.
Sara Baume -
I knew precisely what things I wanted to do – and when and why – and I was deeply resentful of other people’s attempts to enforce structure on my days.
Sara Baume -
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.
Sara Baume -
But it’s too late, I’m sorry. Now I have no idea how things begin, nor how to know that they are safe, nor how to show strangers we are safe too.
Sara Baume -
What did I use to do all day without you? Already I can’t remember.
Sara Baume -
I believe: I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone.
Sara Baume -
I decided that if I didn’t allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn’t have to wake up again and despair.
Sara Baume -
I lie down and think about how this whole long, strange summer ought to end in a substantial event. But, probably, won’t. For the first time I acknowledge the possibility that nothing will die, or change, or even happen.
Sara Baume -
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.
Sara Baume -
I’m fifty-seven. Too old for starting over, too young for giving up.
Sara Baume -
I’ve always longed to have a patch of personal wilderness. Of waist-high grass entwined with wildflowers through which I can prance; within which I can lie down and disappear from sight.
Sara Baume -
Gossamer ribbons swing from your beard and when they hit the kitchen tiles they form a viscous puddle of drool. There’s something resplendent about the way you sit in your viscous drool, and it suits you. Resplendence suits you.
Sara Baume -
The old summer’s-end melancholy nips at my heels. There’s no school to go back to; no detail of my life will change come the onset of September; yet still, I feel the old trepidation.
Sara Baume -
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.
Sara Baume -
But now I remember, of course, I’m never going to be old.
Sara Baume -
I was wrong to try and impose something of my humanity on you, when being human never did me any good.
Sara Baume
