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

Annie Proulx Quotes

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

What could he say?

— Annie Proulx

What he had was what he pretended.

— Annie Proulx

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

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

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

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

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

— Annie Proulx

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

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

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

— Annie Proulx

What could not happen began to happen.

— Annie Proulx

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

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

— Annie Proulx

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

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

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

— Annie Proulx

Wetlands are actually unsung heroes. They nurture young fish, provide refuge to birds, bats, bugs, and sometimes to big mammals like panthers and bears. Mangroves, for instance, are trees and shrubs that inhabit coastal swamps, and they form peat that is home to clams, snails, crabs, and shrimp, and filter pollution out of the water. Their “interlaced roots protect tiny fish from ravenous jaws of larger fish, and even manatees and dolphins take refuge there.

— Annie Proulx

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

— Annie Proulx

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
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