Annie Proulx Quotes

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.

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

This has always bothered me, the division: as though there was something about women who write that is very different.

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

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

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.

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

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…

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.

For the devil had long ago taken a shine to Tert Card, filled him like a cream horn with itch and irritation. His middle initial was X. Face like cottage cheese clawed with a fork.

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.

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

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

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

Quoyle large, white, stumbling along going nowhere