Top 120 Annie Proulx Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it.”

— Annie Proulx

52. “We don’t make the decisions, just does what we’re told where and when we’re told. We lives by rules made somewhere else by sons a bitches don’t know nothin’ about this place.”

— Annie Proulx

53. “The sky a net, its mesh clogged with glowing stars.”

— Annie Proulx

54. “But the only rhyme he could summon for ‘out’ was ‘sauerkraut,’ which lacked poetic glory. He let it go. The right line would come in time. That was the thing about poetry. It crept up through the draws and coulees of the brain.”

— Annie Proulx

55. “He could smell Jack – the intensely familiar odor of cigarettes, musky sweat, and a faint sweetness like grass, and with it the rushing cold of the mountain.”

— Annie Proulx

56. “Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together. George.”

— Annie Proulx

57. “And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.”

— Annie Proulx

58. “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. After.”

— Annie Proulx

59. “In the old days women were important, they were the great deciders. They did everything, some even hunted like men...”

— Annie Proulx

60. “What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, ‘Write what you know.’ It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don’t develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.”

— Annie Proulx

61. “Right,” said Jack, and they shook hands, hit each other on the shoulder, then there was forty feet of distance between them and nothing to do but drive away in opposite directions. Within a mile Ennis felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand a yard at a time. He stopped at the side of the road and, in the whirling new snow, tried to puke but nothing came up. He felt about as bad as he ever had and it took a long time for the feeling to wear off.”

— Annie Proulx

62. “The windows of his house shone in the darkness like squares of melting butter.”

— Annie Proulx

63. “She meant well. But knew nothing about children and the anguish they suffered.”

— Annie Proulx

64. “I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language.”

— Annie Proulx

65. “The old forests are going and once they are gone we will have to wait a thousand years or more to see their like. Though nothing will be allowed such a generous measure of time to grow.”

— Annie Proulx

66. “Billy stretched and yawned, his withered neck taut again for a few seconds. “I can feel the season changing,” he said. “Drawing in. This weather change coming means the end of hot weather. Time I got out to Gaze Island and worked on me poor old father’s grave. Put it off last year and the year before.” Some sadness straining the words. Billy seemed stored in an envelope; the flap sometimes lifted, his flattened self sliding onto the table.”

— Annie Proulx

67. “Plumes of smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air, elegant fountains and twisting snow devils, shapes of veiled Arab women and ghost riders dissolving in white fume.”

— Annie Proulx

68. “The long horizon, the lunging, clotted sea like a swinging door opening, closing, opening.”

— Annie Proulx

69. “You know, the Chinese have forgotten more about sailing than the rest of the world ever knew.”

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

71. “When Quoyle leaned forward the twin spears of the headache threatened to dislodge his eyes.”

— Annie Proulx

72. “The forest had many edges, like a lace altarpiece.”

— Annie Proulx

73. “They say that doing ten sums a day prevents you from becoming senile. But by that argument bankers should be geniuses. That’s not right. Thickest heads in the world.”

— Annie Proulx

74. “Always hated the sight of five, six grown men sitting around a table, doing nothing but work their jaw.”

— Annie Proulx

75. “All the complex wires of life were stripped out and he could see the structure of life. Nothing but rock and sea, the tiny figures of humans and animals against them for a brief time.”

— Annie Proulx

76. “At least he could turn on the shower, stand beneath the hot needles, face thrust near the spray head, feeling the headache move back a little.”

— Annie Proulx

77. “Hard for Bunny who still measured events on a child’s scale of fair and unfair.”

— Annie Proulx

78. “When the watermelons were as large as a child’s head, the women boiled them, but they collapsed into a tasteless green mush that no one could eat, not the children, not the cow.”

— Annie Proulx

79. “In this life we meet difficult people. We must take the time to listen and try to understand them.”

— Annie Proulx

80. “Quoyle bit at the squidburger as though at wrist ropes.”

— Annie Proulx

81. “You got to think a musical instrument is human or, anyway, alive... You take a fiddle now, we say it has a neck, and in the human neck what do you find? Vocal cords like strings, where the sound comes from.”

— Annie Proulx

82. “Their faces were scarified in hideous whorls and dots. As for clothing, they dressed in vegetable matter. Another.”

— Annie Proulx

83. “He put away his identification as Mi’kmaq and became a hybrid person.”

— Annie Proulx

84. “As she spoke she changed in some provocative way, seemed suddenly drenched in eroticism as a diver rising out of a pool gleams like chrome with a sheet of unbroken water for a fractional moment.”

— Annie Proulx

85. “The idea of the North was taking him. He needed something to brace against.”

— Annie Proulx

86. “It is a good thing for a man a hit bottom because that’s when he learns what he’s made out of.”

— Annie Proulx

87. “The moon’s reflection bored into the flat water like a hole into the sea, like the ice well where Tert Card’s father’s hairy devil washed his pots and pans.”

— Annie Proulx

88. “Tu sei troppo importante per me, Ennis, figlio di una puttana troia. Vorrei riuscire a mollarti.”

— Annie Proulx

89. “Gammy Bird was a hard bite. Looked life right in its shifty, bloodshot eye. A tough little paper. Gave Quoyle an uneasy feeling, the feeling of standing on a playground watching others play games whose rules he didn’t know.”

— Annie Proulx

90. “Wet, wet, the interior of the island, they said, bog and marsh, rivers and chains of ponds alive with metal-throated birds. The ships scraped on around the points. And the lookout saw shapes of caribou folding into fog.”

— Annie Proulx

91. “The great bay with its powerful tides, its estuaries and islands, its freshwater rivers and the nurturing ocean supplied everything...”

— Annie Proulx

92. “Money’s a good point, said Jack, and Ennis had to agree. They were respectful of each other’s opinions, each glad to have a companion where none had been expected. Ennis, riding against the wind back to the sheep in the treacherous, drunken light, thought he’d never had such a good time, felt he could paw the white out of the moon.”

— Annie Proulx

93. “You may think that the equation is ‘boat and water.’ It’s not. It’s ‘money and boat.’ The water is not really necessary. That’s why you see so many boats in backyards.”

— Annie Proulx

94. “He’d call him up that night. Tell him. What? That he could gut a cod while he talked about advertising space and printing costs? That he was wondering if love came in other colors than the basic black of none and the red heat of obsession?”

— Annie Proulx

95. “From the bed Beatrix looked at the sky and saw a thin cloud like a ribbon of spilled cream on blue satin.”

— Annie Proulx

96. “In Wyoming they name girls Skye. In Newfoundland it’s Wavey.”

— Annie Proulx

97. “Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they’d never got much farther than that. Let be, let be.”

— Annie Proulx

98. “The armor of indifference in which he protected his marriage was frail... the newspaper rustling with each heave of his chest, tears running down into his ears.”

— Annie Proulx

99. “The announcer’s galvanized voice rattled in the speakers above the enclosed arena. “Now folks, it ain’t the Constitution or the Bill a Rights that made this a great country. It was God who created the mountains and plains and the evenin sunset and put us here and let us look at them. Amen and God bless the Markin flag.”

— Annie Proulx

100. “The fog tore apart, light charged the sea like blue neon.”

— Annie Proulx