Sara Baume Quotes & Sayings

I didn't expect that for every shell on the coast there's a tree in the midlands. — 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

And the tiny figure on the cliffslope's edge ceases his waiting and springs to his paws and sets off at a sprint. He is running, running, running. He is One Eye. He is on his way. — 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

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

And I feel faintly ordinary, faintly inconspicuous, faintly unsuspicious. And it's good, so good. — Sara Baume

I've never seen what he looks like but his disembodied voice is almost godlike in the way it booms from nowhere and reaches everyone, in the way it's terribly indistinct but probably trying to tell us something. Now — Sara Baume

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

He is running, running, running. And it's like no kind of running he's ever run before. He's the surge that burst the dam and he's pouring down the hillslope, channelling through the grass to the width of his widest part. He's tripping into hoof-rucks. He's slapping groundsel stems down dead. Dandelions and chickweed, nettles and dock. — Sara Baume

It seems almost incredible, how far we can drive in a country so small, without ever really reaching anywhere. — 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

Resplendence suits you. — Sara Baume

My thoughts are rancorous, ruinous. They throng through me like a shoal of sharp, silver sprat whenever the outer noises aren't loud or plenty enough to keep them at bay, to keep them out of the bay, the bay of my brain. — Sara Baume

But with summer comes hope, and with hope comes disappointment. — Sara Baume

The only consistency is its constancy. — 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

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

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

I lie down and let life leave its footprints on me. — 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

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. — Sara Baume

I'd again forget that things continue to exist even though I cannot see them. — Sara Baume

I'm fifty-seven. Too old for starting over, too young for giving up. — Sara Baume

Appreciate the people around you. Don't replump their pillows until they return safely in the evening. — Sara Baume

Life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us, I think. Life likes to tell us it told us so. — Sara Baume

I've never been anywhere in the world. I wouldn't know how to get there in the first place. — Sara Baume

What did I use to do all day without you? Already I can't remember. — 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

But life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us. Life likes to tell us it told us so. — 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

recognise him as a person who is lonely as opposed to solitary, who did not choose to be on his own but involuntarily lost people until he was. — Sara Baume

I've never looked through his stuff and I can't explain exactly why it is I'm so incurious. I suppose there are clues about his life there in the shut-up-and-locked room, perhaps even some traces of my mother, but better to be content with ignorance, I've always thought, than haunted by the truth. — Sara Baume

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

I have inadvertently trained you, but you have trained me too. — Sara Baume

It was hard to hate him then, to treat him cruelly.It would have been like kicking a puppy; it would have made me the troll he'd always led me to believe I was. — Sara Baume

I'm afraid of losing you, I never expected I could be so stupidly afraid of losing you. — Sara Baume