Sara Sheridan Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

This investigation felt difficult, like driving in fog.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

Writers are, as a profession, nothing if not eccentric.

I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn.

One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.

Many existing top 20 Scottish writers have flourished in part because of good turns done by institutions, arts community, libraries and bookshops.

I am torn between the freedom of this adventure and the benefits of civilization despite its constraints.

He prefers his adventures second hand.

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.

Sometimes life isn’t what we want, it’s what we get.

That boy is talented. You don’t develop those gifts in houses or in schools.

He’s more a shape in a drape than a hep cat

The financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.

As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it's our literary heritage that is at risk - a vital part of our culture.

I'm proud of the culture I come from - we're a small country and a close-knit community.

On of the prerequisites for my mobile phone is that I have to be able to fling it at a wall if I lose my temper.

Only a man with nothing to hide could make that kind of racket.

He often came back ‘all thinky’ from work.

Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.

She was herself in their company but a very specific version of herself.

It took a certain kind of person to come from luxury and seek out danger.

The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.

It's entirely possible to base an entire book on a long-forgotten letter.

I've always been attracted to stories about rebels - things that are unusual and sometimes dangerous.

I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there.

In wartime, she thought to herself, you don’t call a death murder.

We are home to each other now.

We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.