Quotes by 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.

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.

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

See how community is only a good thing when youre a part of it.

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

And I felt like such a failure. I thought: I cant even do mental illness properly.

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.

People dont like it when you say real things.

Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?

I look at the cake in my mothers arms and think: here stands the only person in the whole world whod go to such trouble for fractious, ungrateful me.

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.

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 didnt care. Once the kitchen door swung shut behind me, I was alone, and so everything was okay.

The old summers-end melancholy nips at my heels. Theres 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 I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.

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

Our toys were sixteen or seventeen; only the very eldest were in their early twenties, because, apparently, I didnt 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.

I wish Id been born with your capacity for wonder. I wouldnt mind living a shorter life if my short life could be as vivid as yours.

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.

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

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