Top 100 Proulx Annie Quotes
#1. 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
#2. It's easier to die if others around you are dying.
Annie Proulx
#3. Home after midnight from a debate on the wording of a minor municipal bylaw on bottle recycling, he felt like he was a pin in the hinge of power.
Annie Proulx
#4. 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
#5. A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.
Annie Proulx
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Strikes, eases, dies, leaves a temporary silence.
Annie Proulx
#13. If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.
Annie Proulx
#14. The old forests are going and once they are gone we will have to wait a thousand years or more to see their like. Though nothing will be allowed such a generous measure of time to grow.
Annie Proulx
#15. The long horizon, the lunging, clotted sea like a swinging door opening, closing, opening.
Annie Proulx
#16. Quoyle saw his life might be spent in the company of dynasitc dogs named Warren.
Annie Proulx
#18. Change itself is what fascinates me. I am drawn, as a moth to the flame, by edge situations, by situations of metamorphosis.
Annie Proulx
#19. 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
#20. Wonderful ... I was up all night reading it, laughing and crying out in horror ...
Annie Proulx
#21. As Annie Proulx is to Wyoming, so is Jane Candia Coleman to Arizona.
Clive Sinclair
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. All them things I don't know could get you killed if I come to know them
Annie Proulx
#25. Anyway, there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle.
Annie Proulx
#26. 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
#27. If you can't fix it, you have to stand it.
Annie Proulx
#28. Especially since I don't want that vinyl stuff outside. 'Oh,' he says, 'that vinyl siding makes a warm house, never has to be painted, you can buy it on time.' I said I wouldn't have it on my coffin." She
Annie Proulx
#29. The huge sadness of the northern plains rolled down on him
and
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.
Close Range, Brokeback Mountain and other stories.
Annie Proulx
#30. 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
#31. In every life there are events that reshape one's sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed.
Annie Proulx
#32. 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
#33. I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.
Annie Proulx
#34. It takes a year, nephew ... a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing someone.
Annie Proulx
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. The windows of his house shone in the darkness like squares of melting butter.
Annie Proulx
#39. Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved.
Annie Proulx
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language
Annie Proulx
#43. We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.
Annie Proulx
#44. The house was heavy around him, the pressure of the past filling the rooms like odorless gas.
Annie Proulx
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. All the complex wires of life were stripped out and he could see the structure of life. Nothing but rock and sea, the tiny figures of humans and animals against them for a brief time.
Annie Proulx
#49. 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
#50. The world is a staircase," hissed the accordion maker in the darkness. "Some go up and some come down. We must ascend.
Annie Proulx
#51. You know, the Chinese have forgotten more about sailing than the rest of the world ever knew.
Annie Proulx
#52. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
Annie Proulx
#53. 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
#54. Ordinary parties, he thought, were subtle games of sexual and social badminton ...
Annie Proulx
#55. 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
#56. That old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong ..
Annie Proulx
#57. Where are the reporters of yesteryear?' he muttered, 'the nail biting, acerbic, alcoholic nighthawk bastards who truly knew how to write?
Annie Proulx
#58. He had a feel for silence, for leading to an unsounded note the listener yearned for ...
Annie Proulx
#59. 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
#60. Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.
Annie Proulx
#61. The forest had many edges, like a lace altarpiece.
Annie Proulx
#62. You've got a chance to start out all over again. A new place, new people, new sights. A clean slate. See, you can be anything you want with a fresh start.
Annie Proulx
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain.
Annie Proulx
#67. 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
#68. You know, friend, this is a goddamn bitch of a unsatisfactory situation.
Annie Proulx
#69. The interior of the station wagon smelled of human hair.
Annie Proulx
#70. There was a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering.
Annie Proulx
#71. Are you like an enchanted thing? A damn story where some girl lets a warty old toad sleep in her shoe and in the mornin the toad's a good-lookin dude makin omelettes?
Annie Proulx
#72. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.
Annie Proulx
#80. I play the fiddle ... I'm not much to listen to yet, but we got no mice in our house.
Annie Proulx
#81. Secretly he was pleased to own a horse with the sand to eat a raw cowboy.
Annie Proulx
#82. For Quoyle was a failure at loneliness, yearned to be gregarious, to know his company was a pleasure to others.
Annie Proulx
#83. 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
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. Their faces were scarified in hideous whorls and dots. As for clothing, they dressed in vegetable matter. Another
Annie Proulx
#88. The devil had long ago taken a shine to Tert Card, filled him like a cream horn with itch and irritation. His middle name was X. Face like cottage cheese clawed with a fork.
Annie Proulx
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. You are a knowledgeable girl," he said, "and a damn good-lookin one, though upholstered. Care for a beer?
Annie Proulx
#92. All the travelin I ever done is going around the coffeepot looking for the handle.
Annie Proulx
#93. You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.
Annie Proulx
#94. Warren made bursting noises under the bed. A rancorous stench. Dog Farts Fell Family of Four.
Annie Proulx
#96. Hell was a great fiery-hot music hall, he thought, where untuned instruments scraped and shrieked in diabolical cacophany ...
Annie Proulx
#97. I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.
Annie Proulx
#98. Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
Annie Proulx
#99. 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
#100. Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives.
Annie Proulx
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