Sara Sheridan Quotes

Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living.
that’s the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred years or only a few weeks. It’s all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers.

~ Sara Sheridan

Didn’t young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?

~ Sara Sheridan

It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.

~ Sara Sheridan

I'm in my 40s and I'm constantly surprised by how much my childhood still plays a part in my life.

~ Sara Sheridan

Kindness was too painful. It had been a long time since he had had to endure it.

~ Sara Sheridan

At length, when I considered it, I realized that the best of my actions were small things. Picking flowers and cooking food for my mother when she had been unwell, spending an afternoon with the children, sending money to my sister or kissing Henry’s tiny head as he slept in the nursery before I left. I thought of every detail and afterwards I felt better. Hellfire and brimstone have never appealed to me and I admit I become easily confused thinking of right and wrong. But I do understand kindness.

~ Sara Sheridan

The jungle is alive. It’s dangerous as a living nightmare and brimful of hostility.

~ Sara Sheridan

The moon was low but not full. The men set out along the dock in conversation. As they dropped onto the dark beach, Simmons declared, ‘There can be no better place in the world than this.’Henderson had to agree. The beach was beautiful. The stars lit the sand and balmy air rode in as the waves washed up on paradise

~ Sara Sheridan

It had occurred to her many times that on board it didn’t matter where you were coming from or where you were heading. Each voyage had its own charisma. Like writing a book – word by word – or crossing a country – step by step – each minute had to be lived moment by moment.

~ Sara Sheridan

It was as if she was a dream, like London, which he could not entirely grasp and of which he was not worthy. He wanted to be part of it but had forgotten how. It seemed extraordinary and strange that this paragon among women had condescended to travel on his ship. In fact, she’d insisted upon it. Her presence was at once otherworldly and familiar, none of which explained why his brain ceased to function when he was in her company.

~ Sara Sheridan

The smell of roasting meat rose from the street stalls in a sizzle and a fiddle player begged for coin as he rasped a haunting melody. Life could not be more perfect.

~ Sara Sheridan

The daily chocolate left Will in high spirits, so that some days he believed he could wheel with the gulls that fished the foaming water close to shore. Now that he felt so free, it came to him that the corner of England, which up till now had been his whole universe, was in fact only a scrap of a boundless realm.

~ Sara Sheridan

A journey is an achievement, Maria, just as much as a mathematical proof.

~ Sara Sheridan

She enjoyed the sights and sounds of the dockside – ports were places of freedom.

~ Sara Sheridan

Her eyes betrayed no shock at the sights of the quay as they unfolded – not the sweating deckhands, the prostitutes crowding the ship, the hubbub of stalls, including one where three slaves were for sale, their ankles manacled. She might as well have been walking through a country garden as she moved inexorably away from the water.

~ Sara Sheridan

We might give her presents, tell some tales, but would she ever be able to really understand what the journey had been like for us?

~ Sara Sheridan

It seemed to me that these months of watching and listening, second-guessing words and phrases, seeking so much that was new, had somehow changed me.

~ Sara Sheridan

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.

~ Sara Sheridan

My father could talk about the Romany way of life and its culture. He could talk about freedom and the Scottish spirit. But that was all he could talk about. I was desperate for someone to talk to but there was just nobody there.

~ Sara Sheridan

Lately Mirabelle had reflected wistfully if people even noticed her – a smartly dressed woman who came and went along the Promenade, always alone.

~ Sara Sheridan

Mirabelle always ate her lunch on Brighton beach if the weather was in any way passable, but out of sheer principle she never paid tuppence for a chair. We did not win the war to have to pay to sit down, she frequently found herself thinking.

~ Sara Sheridan

There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument.

~ Sara Sheridan

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

~ Sara Sheridan

My fascination with history is as much about the present as it is about the past.

~ Sara Sheridan

The question shouldn't be, 'Are we guilty about our Colonial past?' it should be, 'Why aren't we more guilty about our corporate present?

~ Sara Sheridan

He cannot think. He can scarcely breathe. But he has no desire to either, he simply wants to keep kissing her.

~ Sara Sheridan

When you want something badly enough it’s amazing what you’ll ignore.

~ Sara Sheridan

Wellsted will remember this moment for the rest of his life. It is the first time he desires something for himself that is not dedicated to his own advancement. It is the moment he falls in love.

~ Sara Sheridan

The scraps of information she’d gathered knocked against each other, like balls in a pinball machine in one of the arcades on the front. Secrets drew her in every time – the unsaid.

~ Sara Sheridan

Covert operations relied on the unguarded slip, the unconscious choosing of one word over another.

~ Sara Sheridan

The good thing about the aristocracy – German or English – was that they were easily traced, Mirabelle thought.

~ Sara Sheridan

This investigation felt difficult, like driving in fog.


~ Sara Sheridan

Mirabelle was always an enigma, and he had the sense that if he pushed her, she’d bolt.

~ Sara Sheridan

Writing is a profession that has no real career structure and your best advice when you hit a difficulty is probably going to come from another writer one or two rungs on the career ladder ahead of you.

~ Sara Sheridan

If you tempted a poor man with a fortune, who could blame the fellow for taking what he could?

~ Sara Sheridan

Writers have a well-deserved reputation for being eccentric. Everything you've heard is true.

~ Sara Sheridan

There are as many different kinds of books as there are writers - as many different responses as there are readers.

~ Sara Sheridan

Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think.

~ Sara Sheridan

Being able to read well in public and talk about your work in an engaging fashion is part of most writers' job specification.

~ Sara Sheridan

I hope that, whatever happens within the publishing industry, because of the increased control writers have of their own careers, better sales information and the advent of the internet, that ultimately this change in our working environment will be a change for the better.

~ Sara Sheridan