Sara Sheridan Quotes

Reticence was clearly a national characteristic, even if the other person spoke French.
Sara Sheridan
Mirabelle sat down, dropping into the cushions like a ball being caught in a large leather glove.
Sara Sheridan
Social and cultural history is often comprised of whatever diaries and letters remain and that is down to chance and wide open to interpretation.
Sara Sheridan
They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?
Sara Sheridan
Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.
Sara Sheridan
He finds himself bored by the shenanigans of highly spirited young men. Their concerns reside somewhere between balder and dash.
Sara Sheridan
Escapers were the cream of the crop.
Sara Sheridan
I wondered if that was what I was doing myself – caring so much about something that was so long gone that I was only propping it up.
Sara Sheridan
People are so different in wartime. No one gets to be ordinary. Not really.
Sara Sheridan
She picked up the stout and took a sip. It slid down her throat like silk.
Sara Sheridan
Afternoon drinkers shifted in the gloom as if they sensed new blood.
Sara Sheridan
As a historical novelist, there is very little I like more than spending time sorting through boxes of old letters, diaries, maps, trinkets, and baubles.
Sara Sheridan
Books exist for me not as physical entities with pages and binding, but in the province of my mind.
Sara Sheridan
I'm a library user and I just don't hoard books. To me, they're for sharing.
Sara Sheridan
The library is a symbol of freedom.
Sara Sheridan
Communism,” I observed, “is a pile of wank.
Sara Sheridan
If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we’d have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it sometimes becomes much more problematic because they’re erratic. People do crazy things that don’t make sense.
Sara Sheridan
During the war some of the country’s sharpest minds had looked as if they had been dragged through a hedge backwards.
Sara Sheridan
There’s nothing like a military man, even out of uniform.
Sara Sheridan
We are living in glorious days where each readers' voice can be heard.
Sara Sheridan
Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds.
Sara Sheridan
I'm drawn to the 1950s for lots of reasons - everything from the fashion to the increasing sense of freedom and modernity that builds throughout the decade.
Sara Sheridan
The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial.
Sara Sheridan
She tried to focus on the element of riddle or at least puzzle contained in the letter and ignore the sense of doom that was sweeping through her like clouds rolling to the shore over open water.
Sara Sheridan
It’s ridiculous – a girl steps out, goes dancing, gets her hair cut, decides to spend the summer in Italy and it’s a scandal. A chap does it and no one bats an eyelid.
Sara Sheridan
Britain wouldn’t have won the war without its eccentric geniuses.
Sara Sheridan
The old London was fading from her memory. She no longer expected to see the shops that had been bombed when she passed familiar streets. In many places the sites were being redeveloped. That’s what seemed real now – the new buildings and the flats above them. As she hit her stride, Mirabelle smiled. It felt good to be in the big city again and on her way.
Sara Sheridan
Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content.
Sara Sheridan
There was something about Maria Graham that you could believe in – a slice of home. If not unique in her travelling, she was at least extraordinary.
Sara Sheridan
When she first moved to Brighton, the flat on the Lawns had felt luxurious and it had seemed as if she was settling down, sleeping in the same bed every night, the darkness uninterrupted by any hint of emergency. It had felt as if all her difficulties were over.
Sara Sheridan
The devil was always in the detail. And here the detail was certainly devilish.
Sara Sheridan
Muscat is like a mind-altering drug. A stroll in its streets is like getting drunk for the first time
Sara Sheridan
Once you’re on the pleasure express, it’s hard to get off and switch to another, slower service.
Sara Sheridan
Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.
Sara Sheridan
If there’s one shade a woman of colour can’t wear it’s got to be the one everyone expects, hasn’t it?
Sara Sheridan
Having instant feedback on twitter to research material I'm considering is an enormous help.
Sara Sheridan
The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.
Sara Sheridan
If peace came it would have to do so when there had been time to allow the hatred to grow out of people’s thinking.
Sara Sheridan
No one's book is perfect.
Sara Sheridan
I find it inspiring to actively choose which traditions to celebrate and also come up with new ideas for traditions of my own.
Sara Sheridan
Once they have dedicated themselves to a cause, women will fight to the end for it.
Sara Sheridan
Everyone was important during the war. Everyone. We worked together and we won.
Sara Sheridan
I have a very strong sense that we only know where we are by looking clearly at where we've come from.
Sara Sheridan
The smog curled between the streetlamps and the spokes of the wrought iron framework. It seemed through your body and into your bones.
Sara Sheridan
Mrs Beaumont shrugged. ‘Dougie travelled light in life,’ she said. ‘He knew it was people who were important.
Sara Sheridan
An aunt is a safe haven for a child. Someone who will keep your secrets and is always on your side.
Sara Sheridan
Parisians were not easy to engage in conversation. Perhaps that was why the Resistance had been so successful.
Sara Sheridan
Cases fired by emotion rather than money were dangerous.
Sara Sheridan
People who inspire such contradictory emotions must be worthwhile, I reasoned.
Sara Sheridan
I thought of myself mixing the fragrance of a certain day – the heavy musk of the hillside after the rain with the lightness of fresh blossoms doused in the downpour. I thought of each little bottle as the essence of a happy day or a sad one. I mixed the scent of a lonely moment – sandalwood and bergamot lingering over a rich, peppery base.
Sara Sheridan
The fifties is a decade when every year is markedly different from the one before and after. That doesn't happen every decade. 1983 isn't that much different from 1986. But 1953 is very different from 1956.
Sara Sheridan
History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie.
Sara Sheridan
This is the cusp of an age at least as exciting and as brimful of potential as the early days of the printing press.
Sara Sheridan
We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.
Sara Sheridan
The hard fact is that writing is available to readers because of market factors as much as particular writing talent.
Sara Sheridan
One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real.
Sara Sheridan
You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.
Sara Sheridan
The law don’t like jazz clubs. No one wants anything to do with that kind of trouble.
Sara Sheridan
The smell of tobacco usually reminded Mirabelle of being a child – coming downstairs in the morning when the dinner party her parents had hosted the night before was cleared away, but the scent of cigars still lingered.
Sara Sheridan
I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business.
Sara Sheridan