Top 120 Annie Proulx Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I wish I knew how to quit you.”

— Annie Proulx

2. “Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”

— Annie Proulx

3. “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

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4. “You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”

— Annie Proulx

5. “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

6. “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

7. “Change itself is what fascinates me. I am drawn, as a moth to the flame, by edge situations, by situations of metamorphosis.”

— Annie Proulx

8. “If you can’t fix it, you have to stand it.”

— Annie Proulx

9. “In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.”

— Annie Proulx

10. “I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.”

— Annie Proulx

11. “Nothing in the natural world, no forest, no river, no insect nor leaf has any intrinsic value to men. All is worthless, utterly dispensable unless we discover some benefit to ourselves in it – even the most ardent forest lover thinks this way. Men behave as overlords. They decide what will flourish and what will die. I believe that humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I am sorry that I am one of them.”

— Annie Proulx

12. “If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they’ll be in the right place.”

— Annie Proulx

13. “Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.”

— Annie Proulx

14. “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

15. “It’s easier to die if others around you are dying.”

— Annie Proulx

16. “All must pay the debt of nature.”

— Annie Proulx

17. “Wetlands are actually unsung heroes. They nurture young fish, provide refuge to birds, bats, bugs, and sometimes to big mammals like panthers and bears. Mangroves, for instance, are trees and shrubs that inhabit coastal swamps, and they form peat that is home to clams, snails, crabs, and shrimp, and filter pollution out of the water. Their “interlaced roots protect tiny fish from ravenous jaws of larger fish, and even manatees and dolphins take refuge there.”

— Annie Proulx

18. “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

19. “A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.”

— Annie Proulx

20. “The stale coffee is boiling up but he catches it before it goes over the side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid, lets a panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong.”

— Annie Proulx

21. “The water is a dark flower and a fisherman is a bee in the heart of her.”

— Annie Proulx

22. “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

23. “Like vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of things unsaid and now unsayable – admissions, declarations, shames, guilts, fears – rose around them.”

— Annie Proulx

24. “We’re all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.”

— Annie Proulx

25. “Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain.”

— Annie Proulx

26. “And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”

— Annie Proulx

27. “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

28. “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

29. “It takes a year, nephew... a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing someone.”

— Annie Proulx

30. “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

31. “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

32. “Everything that counts is for love, Quoyle. It’s the engine of life.”

— Annie Proulx

33. “What we fear we often rage against.”

— Annie Proulx

34. “Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives.”

— Annie Proulx

35. “Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.”

— Annie Proulx

36. “I think it’s important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.”

— Annie Proulx

37. “All the travelin I ever done is going around the coffeepot looking for the handle.”

— Annie Proulx

38. “I would rather be dead than not read.”

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

40. “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

41. “Anyway, there’s something wrong with everybody and it’s up to you to know what you can handle.”

— Annie Proulx

42. “No wonder, he thought, that the panhandle people were a godly lot, for they lived in sudden, violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble.”

— Annie Proulx

43. “The moon’s reflection bored into the flat water like a hole into the sea...”

— Annie Proulx

44. “Ordinary parties, he thought, were subtle games of sexual and social badminton...”

— Annie Proulx

45. “The mountain pine beetle is a tiny creature that chews through a lodgepole’s bark, gouges out a hollow in the wood and lays its eggs. The larvae hatch hungry and feed on the cambium layer, a tree’s most vital part, the annual layer of cells that makes up a growth ring. To prevent drowning in the tree’s sap, the beetle larvae can eject a choking fungus that not only halts the life-giving flow of sap, but stains the wood a grey-blue color.”

— Annie Proulx

46. “Without getting up he threw deadwood on the fire, the sparks flying up with their truths and lies, a few hot points of fire landing on their hands and faces, not for the first time, and they rolled down into the dirt. One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by a sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.”

— Annie Proulx

47. “Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. Lynn White, Jr.”

— Annie Proulx

48. “Archie was an expert at 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

49. “Warren made bursting noises under the bed. A rancorous stench. Dog Farts Fell Family of Four.”

— Annie Proulx

50. “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