Top 160 Annie Proulx Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “It is not my place to like or dislike, I shall get along...”

— Annie Proulx

102. “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

103. “What could he say?”

— Annie Proulx

104. “It’s like you feel to yourself that’s all you deserve. And the worse it gets the more it seems true, that you got it coming to you or it wouldn’t be that way.”

— Annie Proulx

105. “Knew they’d be lost forever if they went, for even the few that came back were altered in temper as a knife reclaimed from the ashes of a house fire.”

— Annie Proulx

106. “The words poured down with the rain.”

— Annie Proulx

107. “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.”

— Annie Proulx

108. “For Quoyle was a failure at loneliness, yearned to be gregarious, to know his company was a pleasure to others.”

— Annie Proulx

109. “No, he thought, they got him with the tire iron.”

— Annie Proulx

110. “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

111. “It was the idea of abandonment she dreaded. All her life she had been afraid of being left alone while everyone around her vanished.”

— Annie Proulx

112. “No man on earth could be deterred from taking an unknown shortcut.”

— Annie Proulx

113. “The conversation burned off like fog in sunlight.”

— Annie Proulx

114. “Especially since I don’t want that vinyl stuff outside. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘that vinyl siding makes a warm house, never has to be painted, you can buy it on time.’ I said I wouldn’t have it on my coffin.” She.”

— Annie Proulx

115. “Abruptly the clouds began to rip open like rotten cloth, showing bright blue underskirts. As a slice of sunlight painted the drenched countryside, touched the sea, a flight of migrating birds cut the sky like crazy little scissors.”

— Annie Proulx

116. “When someone hurts you that much, does it ever go away? Is it possible?”

— Annie Proulx

117. “He is one of those who cannot be other than lonely. He was born to it.”

— Annie Proulx

118. “He described cities of ice floating in the polar ocean, leaps of death from high places and persons who could leave their earthly bodies at night, transmute into mosquitoes and annoy their neighbors...”

— Annie Proulx

119. “Inside Duquet something like a tightly closed pine cone licked by fire opened abruptly and he exploded with incensed and uncontrollable fury, a life’s pent-up rage. ‘No one helped me,’ he shrieked, ‘I did everything myself. I endured. I contended with powerful men. I suffered in the wilderness. I accepted the risk I might die. No one helped me!’ The boy’s gaze shifted, the fever-boiled eyes following Duquet’s rising arm closing only when the tomahawk split his brain.”

— Annie Proulx

120. “Guessing at the dead man too late.”

— Annie Proulx

121. “The world is a staircase,” hissed the accordion maker in the darkness. “Some go up and some come down. We must ascend.” She refused to agree, put her hands over her ears and moaned when he announced a departure date, later pointed up her chin and rolled her eyes like a poisoned horse when he brought home the trunk with metal corners.”

— Annie Proulx

122. “The moon was a slice of white radish, the shadows of incomparable blackness. The shapes of trees fell sharply on the snow, of blackness so profound they seemed gashes into the underworld. The days were short and the setting sun was snarled in rags of flying storm cloud. The snow turned lurid, hurling away like cast blood.”

— Annie Proulx

123. “Well known how violent it is in the States. Worst you’ll get here,′ said Jack, ’is a good punch-up and maybe your car pushed over the cliff.”

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

125. “What he had was what he pretended.”

— Annie Proulx

126. “He hated the American clear-cut despoliation, the insane wastage of sound valuable wood, the destruction of the soil, the gullying and erosion, the ruin of the forest world with no thought for the future.”

— Annie Proulx

127. “There is something missing from that old proverb, you all know it, money is the root of all evil. I say LACK of money is the root of all evil.”

— Annie Proulx

128. “I hated the slap on the back, the favors for friends, the internecine feuds and fumed oak skulduggery.”

— Annie Proulx

129. “Alkaline water tastes dreadful and was the scourge of covered wagon parties crossing Wyoming for neither men nor beasts could drink it for fear of blistering their tonsils and suffering agonizing stomach cramps.”

— Annie Proulx

130. “Drum roll of rain. Stupid man does wrong thing once more.”

— Annie Proulx

131. “December brought stone-silent days though a fresh odor came from the heavy sky, the smell of cold purity that was the essence of the boreal forest. So.”

— Annie Proulx

132. “One thing about this group, thought Felix, they really like talking about trees.”

— Annie Proulx

133. “He felt he was a pin in the hinge of power. Saw the commonplaces of life as newspaper headlines. Man Walks Across Parking Lot at Moderate Pace. Women Talk of Rain. Phone Rings in Empty Room.”

— Annie Proulx

134. “I play the fiddle... I’m not much to listen to yet, but we got no mice in our house.”

— Annie Proulx

135. “It dulls it, the pain, I mean. It dulls it because you see your condition is not unique, that other people suffer as you suffer. There must be some kind of truth in the old saying, misery loves company. That it’s easier to die if others around you are dying.”

— Annie Proulx

136. “And remember that where there are highlands, there are lowlands with bogs and marshes-they are not discrete.”

— Annie Proulx

137. “Bog waters tend to be shallower than those in fens.”

— Annie Proulx

138. “He had a feel for silence, for leading to an unsounded note the listener yearned for...”

— Annie Proulx

139. “Newfoundland women, as did novelist Bill Gough in his 1984 Mauds House.”

— Annie Proulx

140. “Wyos are touchers, hot-blooded and quick, and physically yearning. Maybe it’s because they spend so much time handling livestock, but people here are always handshaking, patting, smoothing, caressing, enfolding. This instinct extends to anger, the lightning backhand slap, the hip-shot to throw you off balance, the elbow, a jerk and wrench, the swat, and then the serious stuff that’s meant to kill and sometimes does.”

— Annie Proulx

141. “I’m not actually planning anything. A certain period of drifting is in order.”

— Annie Proulx

142. “Were not... children and grandchildren as he had been, like leaves that fall on moving water, to be carried where the stream takes them...”

— Annie Proulx

143. “From a distance the voice of the instrument sounded hoarse and crying, reminding listeners of the brutalities of love, of various hungers.”

— Annie Proulx

144. “You are a knowledgeable girl,” he said, “and a damn good-lookin one, though upholstered. Care for a beer?”

— Annie Proulx

145. “All stemmed from Quoyle’s chief failure, a failure of normal appearance.”

— Annie Proulx

146. “They stepped out of the Wolf’s Den into a blaze of stars so flagrant and shuddering the sky seemed to emit sounds like plucked wires. “Cold!” said Piet.”

— Annie Proulx

147. “What could not happen began to happen.”

— Annie Proulx

148. “If you have to say what something’s about,” said Walter, “it’s not about anything except you saying it’s about something.”

— Annie Proulx

149. “Indonesia’s richly complex wooded peatlands where entrepreneurs log, burn and plow to make palm oil plantations are one of the saddest examples of great biological loss. In shops and stores I read labels and when I find bars of soap made with palm oil I get a mental image of a ravaged forest. I do not buy that soap.”

— Annie Proulx

150. “The same birds still flew from them like signal flares, razored the air with their cries.”

— Annie Proulx