Sara Baume Quotes

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

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

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

The only consistency is its constancy. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

Resplendence suits you. ~ Sara Baume

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Sara Baume

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

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

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? ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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. ~ Sara Baume

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

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

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

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. ~ 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

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. ~ 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

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

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. ~ Sara Baume

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. ~ 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'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

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

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

I aim to be pretty - I gave up dressing to be sexy in the eighties. ~ Sara Blakely

If you put Mirabelle into some of the situations she gets into, there is only one way Mirabelle can behave. ~ Sara Sheridan

The truth is, unlike TV and film cameras, the theater stage doesn't add 10 pounds. ~ Sara Ramirez

His father had been in the military and so had his grandfather. It was a natural fit when Ronan and his brothers each donned a uniform of some kind. ~ Sara Humphreys

I had spent my entire career not wanting to talk about weight, not wanting to deal with it, wanting to be an actor first. ~ Sara Rue

Christians could agree or argue about God as much as we wanted, but it was all essentially chatter. What bound that driver and me together was the obvious thing, so plain and dumb between us we could almost ignore it: the rough wooden pallet of onions that organized our days. Feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit prisoners. We fed people. ~ Sara Miles

I have a tendency, not that anyone I've ever dated I thought wasn't a good person, but sometimes you're not always a good match. ~ Sara Quin

I don't believe I have been compromised. At least not past redemption. -Isabella Weston ~ Sara Lindsey

I have a friend who lives in the South Side of Chicago. I helped out at a church charity there where they try to give a bit of cohesion to a desperate area. Everyone was very welcoming. ~ Sara Paretsky

For us, there's no other option than to hold to the tenets of our faith ~ Sara Chang

...As if it's all so easy. If it's so easy, why don't we talk about it more?"

"It hurts too much," Mather says. Just that simple.

That makes me stop. I meet his eyes, a long, careful gaze. "Someday it won't hurt."

The promise we refugees always make one another - We'll be better . . . someday. ~ Sara Raasch

The older that we get and the different stages we go through in life, it seems like we become different people. But I think that the truth is you are always the same person. You just discover these new things about yourself. ~ Sara Rue

Anger surges in me and I stand up. "You have no right -"
He's on his feet towering over me. "What if I want to have a right? ~ Lisa Renee Jones

Emily felt the Vanilla Coke she was drinking fizz up her nose. ~ Sara Shepard

Make scented geranium cream-Leaves steamed in cream, cream cheese and sugar. When cool-Eat with berries or poached peaches. ~ Sara Midda

Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world. ~ Sara Sheridan

I'm going to check on you in the night," he said. "At random intervals of my choosing."
"I figured. ~ Sara Zarr

Come on." He sighed quietly. "You let me fuck you on Saturday, you put my hand beneath your clothes a few minutes ago, and now you won't join me for lunch. Do you always make a point of being so confusing?."
"Max."
"Sara. ~ Christina Lauren

If stubborness were all that was needed to be a good queen, I'd rule the world. ~ Sara Raasch

So tired of Noam and Herod and Sir and Angra and all these arrogant, puppet-master men who hold all the strings and refuse to give them up. ~ Sara Raasch

I know you saw something. Why else would you guys run? - Mr. Mercer ~ Sara Shepard

I take my kids to the farmer's market - knowing I'm buying local and fresh makes the humiliation of the little choo-choo train ride worthwhile. ~ Sara Gilbert

His hand slides to my face. "Look at me when I enter you."
His voice is rough, intense. "See me, Sara."
"I do."
He presses inside me and thrusts, burying himself deeply, completely. "Feel me."
"Yes."
He lowers his mouth a breath from mine. "But do you feel us?"
My hands slide around him, holding on to him. "Yes."
"I'm not sure you do." He brushes his mouth over mine.
"But before tonight is over, you will. ~ Lisa Renee Jones

You're the most confusing girl I've ever met." "Yeah." I smile. "Not sorry." "Good. ~ Sara Wolf

Let's punk this bitch. - Nisha ~ Sara Shepard

I dig into my Chinese food with my fork, pretending not to listen – but if I were a GIF, I'd be the Michael Jackson eating popcorn in a movie theatre one, so engrossed am I. ~ Sara Ney

As far as long-term goals, one of my favorite artists ever is Tegan and Sara, because every single one of their albums sounds different. Or Beck. I want to be like that because I come from so many different types of musical backgrounds. ~ Shamir

Sometimes, a family is like an ear of summer corn: It might look perfect on the outside, but when you peel the husk away. every kernel is rotten. ~ Sara Shepard

I wasn't writing home. I wasn't writing a death letter, either. I was writing a death journal, a piece of fiction meant for my family and my fiancee, Sara. ~ Clint Van Winkle

There is nothing so uncertain and slippery as fact. ~ Sara Coleridge

It will not change now
After so many years;
Life has not broken it
With parting or tears;
Death will not alter it,
It will live on
In all my songs for you
When I am gone. ~ Sara Teasdale

It's a Buddhist concept. Nonduality. It's about oneness, about how things that seem to be separate are really connected to one another. There are no separations ... This is not just a piece of wood. This is also the clouds that brought the rain that watered the tree, and the birds that nested in it and the squirrels that fed on its nuts. It is also the food my grandparents fed me that made me strong enough to cut the tree, and it's the steel in the axe I used. And it's how you know your fox, which allowed you to carve him yesterday. And it's the story you will tell your children when you give this to them. All these things are separate but also one, inseparable. Do you see? ~ Sara Pennypacker