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.
-
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 -
Why must I test myself? Because no one else will, not anymore. Now that I am no longer a student of any kind, I must take responsibility for the furniture inside my head. I must slide new drawers into chests and attach new rollers to armchairs. I must maintain the old highboys and sideboards and whatnots. Polish, patch, dust, buff.
Sara Baume -
I lie down and let life leave its footprints on me.
Sara Baume -
Whether or not I want to see him, I do not want him to see me.
Sara Baume -
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 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 -
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 -
I’ve never been anywhere in the world. I wouldn’t know how to get there in the first place.
Sara Baume -
It’s a sad place, but then I seem to find most places sad, and maybe it’s me who’s sad and not the places after all. Maybe there’s nowhere I can go, and no point in going.
Sara Baume -
What is it about crying? As if my body believes that squeezing all its salt out might somehow quell the sadness. As if sadness is a parasite which suckles on sodium chloride.
Sara Baume -
So it’s as if,′ I say, ‘I’m okay in my own bones, but I know that my bones aren’t living up to other people’s version of what a life should be, and I feel a little crushed by that, to be honest, a little confused as to how to align the two things: to be an acceptable member of society but to be able to be my own bones both at once.
Sara Baume -
It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.
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 -
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
