Sara Sheridan Quotes - Page 3

I'm proud of the culture I come from - we're a small country and a close-knit community.
Sara Sheridan
He’s more a shape in a drape than a hep cat
Sara Sheridan
The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.
Sara Sheridan
That boy is talented. You don’t develop those gifts in houses or in schools.
Sara Sheridan
Those who have not been stung will hardly fear a bee the same as those who have.
Sara Sheridan
It is through our extended family that we first learn to compromise and come to an understanding that even if we don't always agree about things we can still love and look out for each other.
Sara Sheridan
I knew that I was talented. I was positive about that. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was talented at, but I was ambitious enough to wait it out and see what turned up.
Sara Sheridan
Sometimes life isn’t what we want, it’s what we get.
Sara Sheridan
He prefers his adventures second hand.
Sara Sheridan
I had never really understood what an adventure life could be, if you followed your heart and did what you really wanted to do, which is what we must all do in the end.
Sara Sheridan
I had loved poetry and the theatre. Now I loved adventure more.
Sara Sheridan
I am torn between the freedom of this adventure and the benefits of civilization despite its constraints.
Sara Sheridan
It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes.
Sara Sheridan
Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world.
Sara Sheridan
Writers need each other.
Sara Sheridan
I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn.
Sara Sheridan
One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.
Sara Sheridan
Many existing top 20 Scottish writers have flourished in part because of good turns done by institutions, arts community, libraries and bookshops.
Sara Sheridan
Scotland consistently produces world-class writers.
Sara Sheridan
Writers are a product of where we come from but by looking at alternatives to the culture in which we live, we can find ways to change and hopefully improve it.
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
Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre.
Sara Sheridan
Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify.
Sara Sheridan
The new contract between writers and readers is one I'm prepared to sign up to. I've met some fascinating people at events and online. Down with the isolation of writers I say! And long live Twitter.
Sara Sheridan
It's always been important for writers to be disciplined but now even more so. In addition to the traditional displacement activities like cleaning the fridge or eating cake writers are faced with a plethora of online possibilities (some of which may be professionally worthwhile as well as interesting and fun). As a writer it's important to learn how to focus so you can do both as and when you need to.
Sara Sheridan
Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!
Sara Sheridan
Writers are, as a profession, nothing if not eccentric.
Sara Sheridan
If you tempted a poor man with a fortune, who could blame the fellow for taking what he could?
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
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
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
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
He cannot think. He can scarcely breathe. But he has no desire to either, he simply wants to keep kissing her.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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