The voices / 273 fragments

Sara Sheridan

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Archive entries

01Undated

He noticed that he felt calmer now she was here, still in that grey dress with her dowdy hat, the air around her redolent with orchid oil. Perhaps all women in England had this effect. Perhaps they all smelled of flowers and exuded a calm and measured purpose. He couldn’t remember.

Sara Sheridan / quote

02Undated

The world is changing and you’re only just becoming accustomed to it. You’re changing, I suppose. You’ve changed since I’ve known you.’‘How?’‘You’ve come more alive.

Sara Sheridan / quote

03Undated

There is something particularly fascinating about seeing places you know in a piece of art - be that in a film, or a photograph, or a painting.

Sara Sheridan / quote

04Undated

I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion.

Sara Sheridan / quote

05Undated

There was something indomitable about Maria – like Britannia. He’d heard that she kept her head during a Chilean earthquake the year before when men of greater age and experience had panicked. Afterwards she was discovered calmly taking notes, recording the way the land hand risen, for publication, she said.

Sara Sheridan / quote

06Undated

Over the drop, a luminous pond lay below them like a pale magic lantern. It was as if the moon had plummeted into the water and smashed open. Engulfed in darkness, with only a scatter of stars above, the place felt like a bright secret – something ancient and precious.

Sara Sheridan / quote

07Undated

Maria didn’t fear the sea but, as taught by her father, she respected its power. In her experience the ocean had no intent to drown travellers.

Sara Sheridan / quote

08Undated

A flock of small birds took off from the wall of the fort. They moved like a length of dark silk caught by the breeze as they headed out to sea. Behind them, the sky was the colour of forget-me-nots. The sun blazed.

Sara Sheridan / quote

09Undated

In a heartbeat, he understands why religions are born on the sands – there is nothing here for a man but his own mind.

Sara Sheridan / quote

10Undated

When you fake emotion for a living, when you make your money providing fantasies for other people, tuning into their worlds and indulging them, you don’t invite someone into your world very easily.

Sara Sheridan / quote

11Undated

I am more one for the story, I think, than the action.

Sara Sheridan / quote

12Undated

It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one’s judgement.

Sara Sheridan / quote

13Undated

Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real.

Sara Sheridan / quote

14Undated

I'm a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.

Sara Sheridan / quote

15Undated

While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.

Sara Sheridan / quote

16Undated

I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.

Sara Sheridan / quote

17Undated

As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too.

Sara Sheridan / quote

18Undated

He tasted of whisky and his skin was rough where he hadn’t shaved, but Mirabelle kissed him back.

Sara Sheridan / quote

19Undated

Kissing her is like drinking salted water, he thinks. His thirst only increases.

Sara Sheridan / quote

20Undated

Such a night cannot be shaken from a woman’s memory. Such a night changes your life forever.

Sara Sheridan / quote

21Undated

All those kisses. There must have been a thousand. They engulfed me like some kind of all consuming dream where I became very alive and very relaxed at the same time.

Sara Sheridan / quote

22Undated

Sometimes you don’t even have to have sex at all, and for that kind of sicko, you charge double.

Sara Sheridan / quote

23Undated

She wishes her grandmother had not been so protective, and that she understood better what passes between a man and woman. As it is, she simply enjoys the feelings and wonders if they are what lightning is made of, for everything comes back to the weather. Tears like rain. Smiles like the sun. Hair as dry as sand and fear like the dark ocean.

Sara Sheridan / quote

24Undated

It occurred to me that as a man I could do anything, everything I wanted.

Sara Sheridan / quote