Annie Proulx Quotes

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.

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.

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

Quoyle large, white, stumbling along going nowhere

All stemmed from Quoyle's chief failure, a failure of normal appearance.

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.

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

That world he wanted them to know had vanished as smoke deserts the dying embers that made it.

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

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.

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

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…

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

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.

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.