Top 120 Annie Proulx Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

104. “Captain James Duke, in his early fifties, was complicated, dark-haired, and somewhat handsome. He took a hard-headed and hard-handed stance to disguise an inner recognition of worthlessness. Quixotic, he swung from morbid self-pity to rigid authority over his crews and himself. The future flickered before him as a likely series of disappointments.”

— 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. “He had stanched the blood, which was everywhere, all over both of them, with his shirtsleeve, but the stanching hadn’t held, because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering angel out in the wild columbine, wings folded.”

— Annie Proulx

107. “It is not my place to like or dislike, I shall get along...”

— 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. “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

110. “Cars creeping the other way, fog lights as dull as dirty saucers.”

— Annie Proulx

111. “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

112. “It was not Quoyle’s chin she hated, but his cringing hesitancy, as though he waited for her anger, expected her to make him suffer.”

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

114. “They climbed through the stony landscape, limestone beds eroded by wind into fantastic furniture, stale gnawed breadcrusts, tumbled bones, stacks of dirty folded blankets, bleached crab claws and dog teeth.”

— Annie Proulx

115. “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

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

— Annie Proulx

117. “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

118. “What could he say?”

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

120. “In the arena everything was real because none of it was real except the chance to get dead. The charged bolt came, he thought, because he wasn’t. All around him wild things were falling to the earth.”

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

131. “She noticed a monger’s window where, on a bed of ice, a wonderful scene was worked in fish. A skiff made of flounder fillets rode waves of shrimp and blue-black mussels. A whole salmon was a lighthouse, shot out rays of glittering mackerel. All framed by a border of crab claws. She.”

— Annie Proulx

132. “Partridge’s fire never brought him to a boil.”

— Annie Proulx

133. “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

134. “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