Annie Proulx Quotes
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Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.
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If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.
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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.
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What we fear we often rage against.
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All the travelin I ever done is going around the coffeepot looking for the handle.
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I rarely use the internet for research, as I find the process cumbersome and detestable. The information gained is often untrustworthy and couched in execrable prose. It is unpleasant to sit in front of a twitching screen suffering assault by virus, power outage, sluggish searches, system crashes and the lack of direct human discourse.
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You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.
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I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language
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Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull's-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought clam and gentle pleasure. Were his fingers closing on that one?
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And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
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If a piece of knotted string can unleash the wind, and if a drowned man can awaken, then I believe a broken man can heal.
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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.
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I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.
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Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.
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I would rather be dead than not read
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Wonderful ... I was up all night reading it, laughing and crying out in horror.
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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.
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... there are four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman.
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For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, and that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
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A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.
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We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.
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I didn't have a chance to buy you anything," she said, then held both closed hands toward him. Uncurled her fingers. In each cupped palm a brown egg. He took them. They were cold. He thought it a tender, wonderful thing to do. She had given him something, the eggs, after all, only a symbol, but they had come from her hands as a gift. To him. It didn't matter that he'd bought them himself at the supermarket the day before. He imagined she understood him, that she had to love him to know that it was the outstreched hands, the giving, that mattered.
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It's easier to die if others around you are dying.
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Anyway, there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle.
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If you can't fix it, you have to stand it.
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Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything--cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks--press inexorably on and on.
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In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.
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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.
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Ordinary parties, he thought, were subtle games of sexual and social badminton.
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No wonder, he thought, that the panhandle people were a godly lot, for they lived in sudden, violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble.
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