Sara Baume Quotes

#1. I'm afraid of losing you, I never expected I could be so stupidly afraid of losing you.

Sara Baume

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

Sara Baume

#3. I'm fifty-seven. Too old for starting over, too young for giving up.

Sara Baume

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

Sara Baume

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

Sara Baume

#6. I have inadvertently trained you, but you have trained me too.

Sara Baume

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

Sara Baume

#8. Appreciate the people around you. Don't replump their pillows until they return safely in the evening.

Sara Baume

#9. 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

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

Sara Baume

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

Sara Baume

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

Sara Baume

#16. I'd again forget that things continue to exist even though I cannot see them.

Sara Baume

#17. 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

#18. Resplendence suits you.

Sara Baume

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. Life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us, I think. Life likes to tell us it told us so.

Sara Baume

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

Sara Baume

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Sara Baume

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

Sara Baume

#29. The only consistency is its constancy.

Sara Baume

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

Sara Baume

#31. 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

#32. 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