Top 160 Annie Proulx Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “The same birds still flew from them like signal flares, razored the air with their cries.”

— 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. “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

104. “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

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Annie Proulx

110. “What could he say?”

— 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. “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

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

116. “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

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

— Annie Proulx

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

122. “This too is part of the human psyche – a burning sense of irrevocable loss yoked to a fatalistic acceptance of “progress” and “improvement” and the hubristic idea that “now” – the time in which we live – is superior to all previous times. The proofs given are usually technological “improvements.”

— Annie Proulx

123. “The crack that was Yark’s mouth elongated, not a smile so much as a forcing apart of seams that went with the blunt question. To force Quoyle’s seams apart. And other forced seams implicit.”

— Annie Proulx

124. “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

125. “The world swarmed with terrible problems but they were not her affair.”

— Annie Proulx

126. “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

127. “There are people who are fond of tracing ideas and their connections in unlikely places and old books; I am one of them. I am easily enchanted when an odd idea or phrase looms on a page, often showing an invisible link.”

— Annie Proulx

128. “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

129. “Had blundered into the unlikely journey knowing nothing, breathing grief like a sour gas. Hoping for oxygen soon.”

— Annie Proulx

130. “Nothin like hurtin somebody to make him hear good.”

— Annie Proulx

131. “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

132. “Hadn’t she guessed there was a nick in the edge of that axe? The way Quoyle talked of his love, but never the woman?”

— Annie Proulx

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

— 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

135. “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

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Annie Proulx

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

146. “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

147. “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

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

— Annie Proulx

149. “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

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

— Annie Proulx