Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.

The line reads like a wry, self-mocking aphorism: when sadness (“feeling blue”) arrives, the speaker’s remedy is not a grand philosophy but the bare minimum of staying alive—breathing. Its humor comes from treating an involuntary, continuous act as a deliberate strategy, implying that endurance itself can be a form of coping. As a sentiment, it aligns with a pragmatic, almost stoic idea that returning to the body—breath, rhythm, persistence—can interrupt spirals of despair. However, without a verified Baum source, it is best treated as a modern quip attributed to him rather than a securely contextualized statement from his writings.