A Line Made By Walking 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“But now I remember, of course, I'm never going to be old.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“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, A Line Made By Walking

“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, A Line Made By Walking

“Everything is very nearly over. And so none of the normal rules of behavior apply. And so none of my actions can have consequences.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“And yet, here I am. Perceiving everything that is wonderful to be proportionately difficult; everything that is possible an elaborate battle to achieve. My happy life was never enough for me. I always considered my time to be more precious than that of other people and almost every routine pursuit—equitable employment, domestic chores, friendship—unworthy of it. Now I see how this rebellion against ordinary happiness is the greatest vanity of them all.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“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, A Line Made By Walking

“Only the lighted houses remaining, the lemon blush of their inhabited windows.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“How I adored to draw as a child, a teen; all my life before I began to try and shape a career out of it.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“The director of the Road Safety Authority comes on the radio to tell me that today is the day of the year upon which more people die in car accidents than on any other, as though if he tells me this I might postpone the car accident I had scheduled; I might remember not to be so common, so vulgar, as to die today.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“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, A Line Made By Walking

“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.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“Now I wonder if each artwork is in fact utterly inaccessible to everybody but the person to whom it is secretly addressed?”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“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.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“My mother says: 'People who suffer from anxiety are usually those with the most vivid imaginations.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“Our toys were sixteen or seventeen; only the very eldest were in their early twenties, because, apparently, I didn't envision anything of particular interest in life beyond twenty-five. And now I am a greater age than any of the toys were allowed to reach, older than I even cared to imagine as a child.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“At first I wonder if they are brothers; now I remember to wonder if they are robbers or rapists or murderers who've hired suits and photocopied leaflets in a cunning ploy to insinuate themselves into the quiet bungalows of defenceless strangers on hills in middles-of-nowhere, and I realise it would be very stupid to invite them in so they can see for themselves there's no garda here.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“I open my eyes to find the morning adjourned.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“I think: by the time I'm old, nobody will be able to die any more.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“. . . buzzed up by the knowledge that none of my family knew where I was, who I was with nor when I'd be home again. I didn't even know exactly who I was with or when I'd be home again or where home really was anymore.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“After college, I started working in the gallery and found myself surrounded by a whole new set of people who had not yet grown accustomed to my antisocial tendencies, who had not yet learned to expect me to say no, and stopped asking. I was invited to go drinking and dancing again, and so, I tried.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“And out the bus window, here is my dead world come true, my whole dead world in motion.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“You can't dance to paintings. This is something Ben said, during one of our White Cube conversations, back when I was still wrong about him. He said it even though, at the time, he was desperately trying to be a painter. He said it because it was true and not because it was something either of us wanted to hear.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“I remember the book I was reading. Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector. I remember because there were so many things in Hour of the Star with which I found kinship that I'd brought along a stub of pencil in case I urgently needed to underline.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“Art, and sadness, which last forever.”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking