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21 " 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. "
― Sara Baume , A Line Made by Walking
22 " My mother says: 'People who suffer from anxiety are usually those with the most vivid imaginations. "
23 " It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement. "
24 " And I felt like such a failure. I thought: I can't even do mental illness properly. "
25 " 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. "
26 " People don't like it when you say real things. "
27 " Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque? "
28 " 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. "
29 " 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. "
30 " 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. "
31 " 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. "
32 " But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious. "
33 " But nowadays I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy. "
34 " 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. "
35 " 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. "
36 " I think: by the time I'm old, nobody will be able to die any more. "
37 " But now I remember, of course, I'm never going to be old. "
38 " And out the bus window, here is my dead world come true, my whole dead world in motion. "
39 " 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. "
40 " What bothered me was all of the time he wasted by drumming, and all the time I wasted by listening to him drum, by taking pleasure in it, for pleasure is almost always a waste of time. "