Annie Proulx Quotes

He [Quoyle] did not want a boat, shied from the thought of water. Ashamed he could not swim, couldn't learn.

It was not until the next evening that he discovered he had a page from Leviticus stuck to his back.

Petal, like a persistent song phrase, like a few stubborn lines of verse memorized in childhood. The needle was stuck.

Why do we weep in grief,' the aunt wondered. 'Dogs, deer, birds sufferent with dry eyes and in silence. The dumb suffering of animals. Probably a survival technique.

That was the stuff of other lives, he was waiting for his to begin. He got in the habit of walking around the trailer and asking aloud, "Who knows?" He said, "Who knows?" For no one knew. He meant, anything could happen. A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.

the old place of the Quoyles, half ruined, isolated, the walls and doors of it pumiced by stony lives of dead generations. The aunt felt a hot pang. Nothing would drive them out a second time.

Quoyle with regards to Petal, his wife, "There was a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering...In another time, in another sex, she would have been Genghis Khan.

'Dad, are we scared?' said Sunshine. 'No, honey. It's an adventure.

Place and history are central to the fiction I write, both in the broad, general sense and in detailed particulars. Rural North America, regional cultures in critical economic flux, the images of an ideal and seemingly attainable world the characters cherish in their long views despite the rigid and difficult circumstances of their place and time. Those things interest me and are what I write about. I watch for the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them.

Nutbeem influenced a little by the lunar cycle. Had a touch of werewolf. At full moon he burst, talked himself dry, took exercise in the form of dancing and fighting at the Starlight Lounge, then slowly fell back to contemplation.

Deiter felt himself too old, lost in the forest of his own experience.

I have never fallen in love with one of my characters. The notion is repugnant. Characters are made to carry a particular story; that is their work. The only reason one shapes a character to look as he or she does, behave and speak in a certain way, suffer particular events, is to move the story forward in a particular direction. I do not indulge characters nor give them their heads and "see where they go," and I don't understand writers who drift downriver in company with unformed characters…

In a knot of eight crossings, which is about the average-size knot, there are 256 different 'over-and-under' arrangements possible... Make only one change in this 'over and under' sequence and either an entirely different knot is made or no knot at all may result.

It's kind of an old-fashioned book…It's long; it has a lot of characters; it takes a big theme. It isn't a navel-staring, dysfunctional-family thing that's so beloved of most American writers. It's different, but I think people probably miss those books that were written some time ago – the big book that was written with care.

Dad, there's smoke coming out of the can and coming out of your mouth, too. How do you do that, daddy?