Sara Baume Quotes

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.

But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.

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

I was wrong to try and impose something of my humanity on you, when being human never did me any good

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.

The world is wrong. It took me twenty-five years to realise and now I don't think I can bear it any more. The world is wrong, and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed.

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.

Whether or not I want to see him, I do not want him to see me.

My phone doesn't ring and the doorbell doesn't either and I begin to wonder whether I am still alive.

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.

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.

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.

Resplendence suits you.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

There really isn't much wrong with me,' I say, 'it's just that, well, I'm not like other people; I don't want the things they want. And this is not right, I mean, in other people's eyes, and I feel as though they feel they are duty-bound to normalise me, that it isn't okay just to not want the things they want, you know?

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.

But with summer comes hope, and with hope comes disappointment.

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.

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

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.

It's time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.

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.

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.

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.

But nowadays I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy.

The ability to talk to people: that's the key to the world. It doesn't matter whether you are able to articulate your own thoughts and feelings and meanings or not. What matters is being able to make the noises that encourage others to feel comfortable, and the inquiries which present them with the opportunity to articulate their thoughts and feelings and meanings, the particulars of their existences, their passions, preoccupations, beliefs. If you can talk to people in this way, you can go - you can get - anywhere in this world, in life.

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.

But now I remember, of course, I'm never going to be old.

I decided that if I didn't allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn't have to wake up again and despair.

The entrepreneurs are only about my age, probably younger, but they don't seem so. Their tailored clothes and unbending hairdos, their clipboards and laser pointers, make them seem like real grown-up people in a way I have never been.

My mother says: 'People who suffer from anxiety are usually those with the most vivid imaginations.

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.

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.

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.

This morning, the sun endures past dawn. I realise that it is August: the summer's last stand.

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.

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.

There's a table with some catalogues and a guest book in the corner; there are artworks. Today, I need so badly to be inspired by them, even though I hate that word: inspiration. It crops up in too many advertisements, politcians' speeches, Disney films, its meaning obliterated. I refuse to be 'inspired' in the same insipid way that ad executives and politicians and Hollywood producers suggest I should be. What I need from these works is to be reminded of why I used to care about art - so much that I'd try and make it for myself.

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.

The only consistency is its constancy.

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

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

It makes me wonder if living under tragic circumstances inflects a person's sentences, irresistibly, with poetry.

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.