Top 60 Sara Baume Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Sara Baume

2. “I’m fifty-seven. Too old for starting over, too young for giving up.”

— Sara Baume

3. “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

4. “I believe: I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone.”

— Sara Baume

5. “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

6. “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

7. “See how community is only a good thing when you’re a part of it.”

— Sara Baume

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

— Sara Baume

9. “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

10. “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

11. “Gossamer ribbons swing from your beard and when they hit the kitchen tiles they form a viscous puddle of drool. There’s something resplendent about the way you sit in your viscous drool, and it suits you. Resplendence suits you.”

— Sara Baume

12. “Appreciate the people around you. Don’t replump their pillows until they return safely in the evening.”

— Sara Baume

13. “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

14. “But with summer comes hope, and with hope comes disappointment.”

— Sara Baume

15. “I don’t want to say hello, nor do I want him to know that I’ve seen him and failed to say hello.”

— Sara Baume

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “I’ve never been anywhere in the world. I wouldn’t know how to get there in the first place.”

— Sara Baume

20. “But now I remember, of course, I’m never going to be old.”

— Sara Baume

21. “I lie down and let life leave its footprints on me.”

— Sara Baume

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

— Sara Baume

23. “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.”

— Sara Baume

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

— Sara Baume

25. “See the bird walk, the information board, the noble fir in all its hollow frippery. See the takeaway, the chip shop. The pub, the other pub. The grocer’s and the hairdressing salon, all shut. See the community we were insidiously hounded from. See how community is only a good thing when you’re a part of it.”

— Sara Baume

26. “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

27. “My phone doesn’t ring and the doorbell doesn’t either and I begin to wonder whether I am still alive.”

— Sara Baume

28. “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

29. “What did I use to do all day without you? Already I can’t remember.”

— Sara Baume

30. “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.”

— Sara Baume

31. “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

32. “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

33. “What is it about crying? As if my body believes that squeezing all its salt out might somehow quell the sadness. As if sadness is a parasite which suckles on sodium chloride.”

— Sara Baume

34. “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

35. “Life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us, I think. Life likes to tell us it told us so.”

— Sara Baume

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

— Sara Baume

37. “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.”

— Sara Baume

38. “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.”

— Sara Baume

39. “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.”

— Sara Baume

40. “I’m afraid of losing you, I never expected I could be so stupidly afraid of losing you.”

— Sara Baume

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “In the face of immense tragedy – yet again – unexpected beauty.”

— Sara Baume

47. “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

48. “People don’t like it when you say real things.”

— Sara Baume

49. “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

50. “Why must I test myself? Because no one else will, not anymore. Now that I am no longer a student of any kind, I must take responsibility for the furniture inside my head. I must slide new drawers into chests and attach new rollers to armchairs. I must maintain the old highboys and sideboards and whatnots. Polish, patch, dust, buff.”

— Sara Baume