Sara Baume > Quotes

“This morning, the sun endures past dawn. I realise that it is August: the summer's last stand.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“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, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“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, A Line Made By Walking

“Life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us, I think. Life likes to tell us it told us so.”
― Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“I lie down and let life leave its footprints on me.”
― Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“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, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“I was wrong to try and impose something of my humanity on you, when being human never did me any good”
― Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“What did I use to do all day without you? Already I can't remember.”
― Sara Baume , Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“People don't like it when you say real things.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“I’m afraid of losing you, I never expected I could be so stupidly afraid of losing you.”
― Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“I’ve never been anywhere in the world. I wouldn’t know how to get there in the first place.”
― Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“I’m fifty-seven. Too old for starting over, too young for giving up.”
― Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“Now we see it, lying in the middle of the road. A swan, a mute swan. It looks like an offcut of organza, crumpled around the edges, twitching. As we pass we see its long neck has buckled into its body like a folding chair. We see its wings are tucked back as if the tar is liquid and the swan is swimming.
There are two men and a woman in the road. One man is standing on the tar, the other is directing the traffic. The woman is kneeling down beside the swan. I think she is crying, she seems to be crying, and this makes me suddenly angry. I think of all the other creatures we’ve seen since we set out. I think of the rat, the fox, the kitten, the badger. I think of the jackdaw, did you see the jackdaw? We passed it in the queue to pass the swan. Its beak was cracked open, its brains squeeged out. Why didn’t anybody stop for the jackdaw? Because the swan looks like a wedding dress, that’s why. Whereas the jackdaw looks like a bin bag. Because this is how people measure life.”
― Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“MAKE WAY FOR A WHOLE NEW YOU. But it took me fifty-seven years to become this me, I think, and I just don’t have the stamina to make so many mistakes all over again.”
― Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“I believe: I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“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, A Line Made By Walking

“See how community is only a good thing when you're a part of it.”
― 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, A Line Made By Walking

“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, A Line Made By Walking

“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, A Line Made By Walking

“The last time I went out at night in the city was almost a year ago. It began with anxiety, then I was pleasantly pissed for a couple of hours, and finally, around the point at which people started taking to the dance floor, I sobered and saddened and the old chant returned: I want to go home.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“Though I am naturally curious about people, I'm also naturally uneasy when they are right in front of me; when I am right in front of them.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“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, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“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, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“But with summer comes hope, and with hope comes disappointment.”
― Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“Now see the nasturtiums. The leaves are like tiny green parasols blown inside-out and the flowers are terrifically garish. In every village we pass through, see how they are everywhere, how they fill every gap in every wall, every crack in every path.
The nasturtiums have it figured out, how survival’s just a matter of filling in the gaps between sun up and sun down. Boiling kettles, peeling potatoes, laundering towels, buying milk, changing light-bulbs, rooting wet mats of pubic hair out of the shower’s plughole. This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for the flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season’s out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life’s eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself.”
― Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither

“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, A Line Made By Walking

“My mother likes odd numbers and is suspicious of the even ones. She reads a new book every week and is bewitched by black holes in the universe. She describes herself as an optimist but she worries about everything—worries incessantly—worries on behalf of others when she feels they are not worrying adequately for themselves.

And my mother misses her own mother, my grandmother, immensely, who only has a past now; who is only allowed to be as we remember her.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“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, A Line Made By Walking

“We’re still standing outside the front gate of the shell cottage as a boy in football socks stomps down his driveway to retrieve a wheelie bin. Now we watch as he drags it up through the laurel and back to the house. All his gestures are exaggeratedly huffy, though there’s no one to witness his protest, no one but you and me, and the boy didn’t even see us.
We walk from the thistles to where the cliff drops into open Atlantic and there’s nothing but luscious, jumping blue all the way to America. I’m still thinking of the boy in the driveway, of how he doesn’t realise how lucky he is to live here where there’s space to run and the salt wind ruddies his cheeks each day, how he takes it all for normal and considers himself entitled to be huffy with the wheelie bin. Now I wonder was I was lucky too, and never grateful? Sometimes a little hungry and sometimes a little cold, but not once sick or struck and every day with the sea to ruddy me. Perhaps I was lucky my father took me back when the neighbour woman rang his doorbell, lucky he never drove away and left me on the road again. But it’s too late to be grateful now. It’s too late now for everything but regret.”
― Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither