E. Annie Proulx Quotes

You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

I wish I knew how to quit you.

Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

Anyway, there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle.

If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.

We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.

Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

What we fear we often rage against.

If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit Awards.

Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.

It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience, prejudices, worldview and thoughts.

Ordinary parties, he thought, were subtle games of sexual and social badminton.

It takes a year, nephew... a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing someone.

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.

I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.

And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.

... 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.

In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.

All the travelin I ever done is going around the coffeepot looking for the handle.

If you can't fix it, you have to stand it.

No wonder, he thought, that the panhandle people were a godly lot, for they lived in sudden, violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble.

...all them things I don't know could get you killed if I come to know them

Wonderful ... I was up all night reading it, laughing and crying out in horror.

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.

A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.

I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language

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.

Change itself is what fascinates me. I am drawn, as a moth to the flame, by edge situations, by situations of metamorphosis.

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.

I would rather be dead than not read

It's easier to die if others around you are dying.

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.

In every life there are events that reshape one's sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed.

When the watermelons were as large as a child's head, the women boiled them, but they collapsed into a tasteless green mush that no one could eat, not the children, not the cow.

The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it.

Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do.

All must pay the debt of nature.

You’ve got a chance to start out all over again. A new place, new people, new sights. A clean slate. See, you can be anything you want with a fresh start.