Proulx Annie Quotes & Sayings

I play the fiddle ... I'm not much to listen to yet, but we got no mice in our house. — Annie Proulx

And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets. — Annie Proulx

James said, "Who are these lawless men who cut your - our - timber?" "Every man!" Edward said angrily, spit flying. "They are mostly small, mean men seeking to make some money. But there are so many of them. They are often savage hungry fellows who stop at nothing. They fight the owners until blood flows and heads are cracked. Even when we catch and prosecute them, they and their friends slip back at night and continue cutting. Settlers, failed businessmen, shingle makers and clapboard sawyers, those are the thieves. And moonlight nights see many good pines fall. — Annie Proulx

For Archie was an expert in dividing the affairs of life into men's business and women's business. An empty cupboard and a full plate were the man's business, a full cupboard and an empty plate the concern of the woman. — Annie Proulx

A bald eagle perched in a dead tree, watching us. The landscape was bold. Not only was the property on the North Platte River but the river ran through it, taking an east-west turn for a few miles in its course. The land was a section, 640 acres, a square mile of riparian shrubs and cottonwood, some wetland areas during June high water, sage flats and a lot of weedy overgrazed pasture (46). — Annie Proulx

The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack's sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he'd thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack's own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. — Annie Proulx

Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved. — Annie Proulx

Their faces were scarified in hideous whorls and dots. As for clothing, they dressed in vegetable matter. Another — Annie Proulx

Anyway, there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle. — Annie Proulx

By January it had always been winter. — Annie Proulx

What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one. — Annie Proulx

Quoyle remembered purple-brown seckle pears the size and shape of figs, his father taking the meat off with pecking bites, the smell of fruit in their house, litter of cores and peels in the ashtrays, the grape cluster skeletons, peach stones like hens' brains on the windowsill, the glove of banana peel on the car dashboard. In the sawdust on the basement workbench galaxies of seeds and pits, cherry stones, long white date pits like spaceships ... The hollowed grapefruit skullcaps, cracked globes of tangerine peel. — Annie Proulx

These homes of love we build, house many rooms, sanded and painted in the shades and colours of our life, furnished with those moments that, however inconsequential they may seem to others, have in fact, defined us. — Annie Proulx

She noticed a monger's window where, on a bed of ice, a wonderful scene was worked in fish. A skiff made of flounder fillets rode waves of shrimp and blue-black mussels. A whole salmon was a lighthouse, shot out rays of glittering mackerel. All framed by a border of crab claws. She — Annie Proulx

If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place. — Annie Proulx

He had a feel for silence, for leading to an unsounded note the listener yearned for ... — Annie Proulx

If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he
had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it. — Annie Proulx

Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull's-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought clam and gentle pleasure. Were his fingers closing on that one? — Annie Proulx

It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience, prejudices, world view and thoughts. — Annie Proulx

He had wanted to be a sophomore. — Annie Proulx

It's easier to die if others around you are dying. — Annie Proulx

Wet, wet, the interior of the island, they said, bog and marsh, rivers and chains of ponds alive with metal-throated birds. The ships scraped on around the points. And the lookout saw shapes of caribou folding into fog. — Annie Proulx

They say that doing ten sums a day prevents you from becoming senile. But by that argument bankers should be geniuses. That's not right. Thickest heads in the world. — Annie Proulx

What do you think,' she said. Her voice was rapid. 'You want to
marry me, don't you? Don't you think you want to marry me?' Waited for
the wisecrack. As she spoke she changed in some provocative way,
seemed suddenly drenched in eroticism as a diver rising out of a pool
gleams like chrome with a sheet of unbroken water for a fractional
second. — Annie Proulx

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience. — Annie Proulx

If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit Awards. — Annie Proulx

Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. — Annie Proulx

As Annie Proulx is to Wyoming, so is Jane Candia Coleman to Arizona. — Clive Sinclair

There are four women in every man's heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman. — Annie Proulx

That old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong .. — Annie Proulx

Again the ranch is on the market and they've shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, 'Give them to the real estate shark, I'm out a here," dropping the keys in Ennis's hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream. — Annie Proulx

Inside Duquet something like a tightly closed pine cone licked by fire opened abruptly and he exploded with incensed and uncontrollable fury, a life's pent-up rage. 'No one helped me,' he shrieked, 'I did everything myself. I endured. I contended with powerful men. I suffered in the wilderness. I accepted the risk I might die. No one helped me!' The boy's gaze shifted, the fever-boiled eyes following Duquet's rising arm closing only when the tomahawk split his brain. — Annie Proulx

Here's Doc Osborne, first Democratic governor. A lynch mob hung Big Nose George Parrott back in the 1870s. Doc got the body, skinned it, tanned the hide, made himself a medical bag and a pair a shoes. Wore the shoes to his inauguration. They don't make Democrats like that anymore. — Annie Proulx

December brought stone-silent days though a fresh odor came from the heavy sky, the smell of cold purity that was the essence of the boreal forest. So — Annie Proulx

You are a knowledgeable girl," he said, "and a damn good-lookin one, though upholstered. Care for a beer? — Annie Proulx

Strikes, eases, dies, leaves a temporary silence. — Annie Proulx

Ten Little Indians once again shows [Alexie] to be not just one of the West's best, but one of the most brilliantly literate American writers, even funnier than Louise Erdrich, even more primal than Jim Harrison, and even more eloquent than Annie Proulx. — Ron Franscell

You got no fuckin idea how bad it gets. I'm not you. I can't make it on a couple a high-altitude fucks once or twice a year. You're too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you. — Annie Proulx

The long horizon, the lunging, clotted sea like a swinging door opening, closing, opening. — Annie Proulx

The world is a staircase," hissed the accordion maker in the darkness. "Some go up and some come down. We must ascend. — Annie Proulx

Wonderful ... I was up all night reading it, laughing and crying out in horror ... — Annie Proulx

It takes a year, nephew ... a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing someone. — Annie Proulx

All the travelin I ever done is going around the coffeepot looking for the handle. — Annie Proulx

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it. — Annie Proulx

We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up. — Annie Proulx

Secretly he was pleased to own a horse with the sand to eat a raw cowboy. — Annie Proulx

The forest had many edges, like a lace altarpiece. — Annie Proulx

Ennis was back on his feet and somehow, as a coat hanger is straightened to open a locked car and then bent again to its original shape, they torqued things almost to where they had been, for what they'd said was no news. Nothing ended, nothing began, nothing resolved. — Annie Proulx

Three or four days later he was still thinking about seal flipper pie. Remembered the two raw eggs Petal gave him. That he invested with pathetic meaning.
'Petal,' said Quoyle to Wavey, 'hated to cook. Hardly ever did.' Thought of the times he had fixed dinner for her, set put his stupid candles, folded the napkins as though they were important, waited and finally ate alone, the radio on for company. And later dined with the children, shoveling in canned spaghetti, scraping baby food off small chins.
'Once she gave me two eggs. Raw eggs for a present.' He had made an omelet of them, hand-fed her as thought she were a nestling bird. And saved the shells in a paper cup on top of the kitchen cabinet. Where they still must be. — Annie Proulx

You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country
indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky
provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut ...
... Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that. — Annie Proulx

You got to think a musical instrument is human or, anyway, alive ... You take a fiddle now, we say it has a neck, and in the human neck what do you find? Vocal cords like strings, where the sound comes from. — Annie Proulx

You all know we are only passing by. We only walk over these stones a few times, our boats float a little while and then they have to sink. The water is a dark flower and a fisherman is a bee in the heart of her. — Annie Proulx

Place. Less than 1 percent of the area is managed for wildlife habitat protection. Where early travelers saw sharp-tailed grouse, bison, bighorn sheep, grizzly bears, numerous beaver and even wolverines, today they see dust, feral horses, and noxious weeds including cheatgrass, halogeton and Russian thistle. — Annie Proulx

Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything
cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks
press inexorably on and on. — Annie Proulx

One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough. — Annie Proulx

if you can't fix it you got a stand it. — Annie Proulx

And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery. — Annie Proulx

Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. "I'm coming back some day," they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore. — Annie Proulx

And I think that's important, to know how the water's gone over the dam before you start to describe it. It helps to have been over the dam yourself. — Annie Proulx

Hell was a great fiery-hot music hall, he thought, where untuned instruments scraped and shrieked in diabolical cacophany ... — Annie Proulx

I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story. — Annie Proulx

It was as if his eye were an ear and a crackle went through it each time he shot a look at the accordion ...
The notes fell, biting and sharp; it seemed the tooth that bit was hollowed with pain. — Annie Proulx

The only cities were of ice, bergs with cores of beryl, blue gems within white gems, that some said gave off an odor of almonds. — Annie Proulx

I rarely use the Internet for research, as I find the process cumbersome and detestable. The information gained is often untrustworthy and couched in execrable prose. It is unpleasant to sit in front of a twitching screen suffering assault by virus, power outage, sluggish searches, system crashes, the lack of direct human discourse, all in an atmosphere of scam and hustle. — Annie Proulx

Where are the reporters of yesteryear?' he muttered, 'the nail biting, acerbic, alcoholic nighthawk bastards who truly knew how to write? — Annie Proulx

We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. The sooner you say 'Yes, it happened, and there's nothing I can do about it,' the sooner you can get on with your own life. You've got children to bring up. So you've got to get over it. What we have to get over, somehow we do. Even the worst things. — Annie Proulx

Alkaline water tastes dreadful and was the scourge of covered wagon parties crossing Wyoming for neither men nor beasts could drink it for fear of blistering their tonsils and suffering agonizing stomach cramps. — Annie Proulx

The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it. — Annie Proulx

The past bubbled out of his black mouth. — Annie Proulx

Late in the afternoon, thunder growling, that same old green pickup rolled in and he saw Jack get out of the truck, beat up Resistol tilted back. A hot jolt scalded Ennis and he was out on the landing pulling the door closed behind him. Jack took the stairs two and two. They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard, Jack's big teeth bringing blood, his hat falling to the floor, stubble rasping, wet saliva welling, and the door opening and Alma looking out for a few seconds at Ennis's straining shoulders and shutting the door again and still they clinched, pressing chest and groin and thigh and leg together, treading on each other's toes until they pulled apart to breathe and Ennis, not big on endearments, said what he said to his horses and his daughters, little darlin. — Annie Proulx

Kuntaw died on the most beautiful day in a thousand years. The October air was sweet and every faint breath a pleasure. Wind stirred and he said, "Our wind reaching me here." A small cloud formed in the west. "Our small cloud coming to me." The hours passed and the small cloud formed a dark wall and approached. A drop fell, another, many, and Kuntaw said, "Our rain wetting my face." His people came near him, drawing him into their eyes, and he said, "Now . . . what . . ." The sun came out, the brilliant world sparkled, susurration, liquid flow, stems of striped grass what was it what was it the limber swish of a released branch. What, now what. Kuntaw opened his mouth, said nothing, and let the sunlight enter him. — Annie Proulx

And they shook hands, hit each other on the
shoulder, then there was forty feet of distance between them and
nothing to do but drive away in opposite directions. Within a mile
Ennis felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand a
yard at a time. He stopped at the side of the road and, in the whirling
new snow, tried to puke but nothing came up. He felt about as bad as
he ever had and it took a long time for the feeling to wear off. — Annie Proulx

As it did go. They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word except once Ennis said, "I'm not no queer," and Jack jumped in with "Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody's business but ours. — Annie Proulx

And so my father changed his name to William Pretty and here he grew up and led an independent life. And if it was not happy, he didn't know it. — Annie Proulx

Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain. — Annie Proulx

You know, friend, this is a goddamn bitch of a unsatisfactory situation. — Annie Proulx

You know, the Chinese have forgotten more about sailing than the rest of the world ever knew. — Annie Proulx

If a piece ofknotted string can unleash the wind and if a drowned man can awaken ... then I believe a broken man can heal. — Annie Proulx

He felt he was a pin in the hinge of power. Saw the commonplaces of life as newspaper headlines. Man Walks Across Parking Lot at Moderate Pace. Women Talk of Rain. Phone Rings in Empty Room. — Annie Proulx

I know something now I didn't know a year ago," said Quoyle. "Petal wasn't any good. And I think maybe that is why I loved her."
"Yes," said Wavey. "Same with Herold. It's like you feel to yourself that's all you deserve. And the worse it gets the more it seems true, that you got it coming to you or it wouldn't be that way. You know what I mean? — Annie Proulx

When the watermelons were as large as a child's head, the women boiled them, but they collapsed into a tasteless green mush that no one could eat, not the children, not the cow. — Annie Proulx

Oh, he was ever a leading spirit in controversies," Bernard said. "I well remember his sentiments. He believed that men, when confronted with a vast plenitude of anything, feel an irresistible urge to take it all, then to smash and destroy what they cannot use." (4th Estate, London, 2016, p. 211.) — Annie Proulx

Quoyle saw his life might be spent in the company of dynasitc dogs named Warren. — Annie Proulx

You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music. — Annie Proulx

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write. — Annie Proulx

Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. — Annie Proulx

But the only rhyme he could summon for 'out' was 'sauerkraut,' which lacked poetic glory. He let it go. The right line would come in time. That was the thing about poetry. It crept up through the draws and coulees of the brain. — Annie Proulx

No, they didn't have any money, the sea was dangerous and men were lost, but it was a satisfying life in a way people today do not understand. There was a joinery of lives all worked together, smooth in places, or lumpy, but joined. The work and the living you did was the same things, not separated out like today. — Annie Proulx

What we fear we often rage against. — Annie Proulx

Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading. — Annie Proulx

There was a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering. — Annie Proulx

The house was heavy around him, the pressure of the past filling the rooms like odorless gas. — Annie Proulx

A kind of joyous hysteria moved into the room, everything flying before the wind, vehicles outside getting dented to hell, the crowd sweaty and the smells of aftershave, manure, clothes dried on the line, your money's worth of perfume, smoke, booze; the music subdued by the shout and babble through the bass hammer could be felt through the soles of the feet, shooting up the channels of legs to the body fork, center of everything. It is the kind of Saturday night that torches your life for a few hours, makes it seem like something is happening. — Annie Proulx

We don't make the decisions, just does what we're told where and when we're told. We lives by rules made somewhere else by sons a bitches don't know nothin' about this place. — Annie Proulx

Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do. — Annie Proulx

The mountain pine beetle is a tiny creature that chews through a lodgepole's bark, gouges out a hollow in the wood and lays its eggs. The larvae hatch hungry and feed on the cambium layer, a tree's most vital part, the annual layer of cells that makes up a growth ring. To prevent drowning in the tree's sap, the beetle larvae can eject a choking fungus that not only halts the life-giving flow of sap, but stains the wood a grey-blue color. — Annie Proulx

Nothing in the natural world, no forest, no river, no insect nor leaf has any intrinsic value to men. All is worthless, utterly dispensable unless we discover some benefit to ourselves in it - even the most ardent forest lover thinks this way. Men behave as overlords. They decide what will flourish and what will die. I believe that humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I am sorry that I am one of them. — Annie Proulx

All must pay the debt of nature. — Annie Proulx

Once there was a moose, a very poor, thin, lonely moose who lived on a rocky hill where only bitter leaves grew and bushes with spiky branches. One day a red motor car drove past. In the backseat was
a grey gypsy dog wearing a gold earring. — Annie Proulx

Change itself is what fascinates me. I am drawn, as a moth to the flame, by edge situations, by situations of metamorphosis. — Annie Proulx