Annie Proulx Quotes

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

Quoyle, you got any maritime connections?' 'My grandfather was a sealer.' 'Jesus. You always come out at me out of left field.

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.

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

And three lucky stones strung on a wire to keep the house safe.

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.

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.

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.

As he cut, the wildness of the world receded, the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass shivered as each tree fell and one by one the web strands snapped.

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…

Quoyle, who spoke little himself, inspired talkers. His only skill in the game of life

I don't think I was a particularly good or diligent mother. It took a long time for the obvious to become obvious: I could not operate in a conventional family.

The future flickered before him as a likely series of disappointments.

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

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.