01UndatedThere'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 / quote ↗
02UndatedAfter 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.Sara Baume / quote ↗
03UndatedNo 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 / quote ↗
04Undated. . . buzzed up by the knowledge that none of my family knew where I was, who I was with nor when I'd be home again. I didn't even know exactly who I was with or when I'd be home again or where home really was anymore.Sara Baume / quote ↗
06UndatedHow easy to be electrocuted. How fine the line between beauty and peril.Sara Baume / quote ↗
07UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
08UndatedI love that an idea can be so powerful it doesn't matter whether I've seen the artwork for real or not.Sara Baume / quote ↗
09UndatedHow I adored to draw as a child, a teen; all my life before I began to try and shape a career out of it.Sara Baume / quote ↗
10UndatedNow I wonder if each artwork is in fact utterly inaccessible to everybody but the person to whom it is secretly addressed?Sara Baume / quote ↗
11UndatedYou can't dance to paintings. This is something Ben said, during one of our White Cube conversations, back when I was still wrong about him. He said it even though, at the time, he was desperately trying to be a painter. He said it because it was true and not because it was something either of us wanted to hear.Sara Baume / quote ↗
13UndatedI was wrong to try and impose something of my humanity on you, when being human never did me any goodSara Baume / quote ↗
14UndatedBlending 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.Sara Baume / quote ↗
15UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
16UndatedMy 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.Sara Baume / quote ↗
17UndatedI decided that if I didn't allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn't have to wake up again and despair.Sara Baume / quote ↗
18UndatedThere 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 / quote ↗
19UndatedSo 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 / quote ↗
20UndatedBut I know I will do neither; nothing. I have all the time in the world, and yet, I can't be bothered.Sara Baume / quote ↗
21UndatedIt 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 / quote ↗
22UndatedAnd 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.Sara Baume / quote ↗
23UndatedMy mother says: 'People who suffer from anxiety are usually those with the most vivid imaginations.Sara Baume / quote ↗
