Annie Proulx Quotes

“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

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

“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

“If you can't fix it, you have to stand it.”

— Annie Proulx

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 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

He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.

— Annie Proulx

“Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.”

— 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

“All the travelin I ever done is going around the coffeepot looking for the handle.”

— 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

“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

“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

The room stank of semen and smoke and sweat and whiskey, of old carpet and sour hay, saddle leather, shit and cheap soap.

— 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

“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

“There was a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering.”

— Annie Proulx

I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language

— Annie Proulx

“The past bubbled out of his black mouth.”

— 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

“All must pay the debt of nature.”

— 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

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

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

“No wonder, he thought, that the panhandle people were a godly lot, for they lived in sudden, violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble.
... it was real muggy earlier, hot enough to cook a bear. Anyway, you get used a rapid weather change.”

— Annie Proulx

“The tide was still on the ebb in that complex swell and fall of water against land, as though a great heart in the centre of the earth beat but twice a day.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

— Annie Proulx

“You know, friend, this is a goddamn bitch of a unsatisfactory situation.”

— Annie Proulx

“In every life there are events that reshape one's sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed.”

— Annie Proulx

“The interior of the station wagon smelled of human hair.”

— 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

“He had a feel for silence, for leading to an unsounded note the listener yearned for ...”

— 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

“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

“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

“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

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

— 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

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

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

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

“Wonderful ... I was up all night reading it, laughing and crying out in horror ...”

— 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

“In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.”

— Annie Proulx