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

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

— 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.

— Sara Baume

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

— 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.

— 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.

— Sara Baume

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

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 normalize me, that it isn't okay just to not want the things they want, you know?

— Sara Baume

There's a table with some catalogs 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, politicians' 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

This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, paper cutting the lining of my veins.

— Sara Baume