Best 61 quotes of Sara Baume on MyQuotes

Sara Baume

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    Sara Baume

    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.

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    Sara Baume

    And I felt like such a failure. I thought: I can't even do mental illness properly.

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    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.

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    Sara Baume

    And out the bus window, here is my dead world come true, my whole dead world in motion.

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    Sara Baume

    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.

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    Sara Baume

    Art, and sadness, which last forever.

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    Sara Baume

    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.

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    Sara Baume

    Blending into the tinctures and textures of the countryside. The tree which falls without any human hearing still falls, as the creatures who die without being found by a human still die.

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    Sara Baume

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

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    Sara Baume

    But I know I will do neither; nothing. I have all the time in the world, and yet, I can't be bothered.

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    Sara Baume

    But no, now I see I never meant to Ben what Ben meant to me. If there was anything I said which resonated in return, he found a better speech elsewhere. My romance went no further than his coat.

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    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.

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    Sara Baume

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

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    Sara Baume

    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.

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    Sara Baume

    Everything is very nearly over. And so none of the normal rules of behavior apply. And so none of my actions can have consequences.

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    Sara Baume

    How easy to be electrocuted. How fine the line between beauty and peril.

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    Sara Baume

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Sara Baume

    I don't want to say hello, nor do I want him to know that I've seen him and failed to say hello.

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    Sara Baume

    I knew precisely what things I wanted to do—and when and why—and I was deeply resentful of other people's attempts to enforce structure on my days.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Sara Baume

    I love that an idea can be so powerful it doesn't matter whether I've seen the artwork for real or not.

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    Sara Baume

    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.

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    Sara Baume

    In the days approaching Christmas, she always reminds me of the previous year: 'Jane crocheted you an entire poncho, and all you gave her was a bone-shaped beach stone.

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    Sara Baume

    In the face of immense tragedy—yet again—unexpected beauty.

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    Sara Baume

    I open my eyes to find the morning adjourned.

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    Sara Baume

    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.

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    Sara Baume

    I see foxes often, but always they are crossing fallow fields in the distance. Gold flecks on faraway expanses of green. Magnetic to the meandering eye. Enigmatic, unreachable.

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    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.

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    Sara Baume

    I think: by the time I'm old, nobody will be able to die any more.

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    Sara Baume

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

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    Sara Baume

    It's too warm for red wine; now I mix gin and tonics instead. I find they make the ordinary sensation of living lighter, less ruffled.

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    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.

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    Sara Baume

    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.

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    Sara Baume

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    Sara Baume

    Now I wonder if each artwork is in fact utterly inaccessible to everybody but the person to whom it is secretly addressed?

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    Sara Baume

    Only the lighted houses remaining, the lemon blush of their inhabited windows.

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    Sara Baume

    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.

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    Sara Baume

    People don't like it when you say real things.

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    Sara Baume

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

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    Sara Baume

    So it's as if,' I say, 'I'm okay in my own bones, but I know that my bones aren't living up to other people's version of what a life should be, and I feel a little crushed by that, to be honest, a little confused as to how to align the two things: to be an acceptable member of society but to be able to be my own bones both at once.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Sara Baume

    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.

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    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.