Annie Proulx

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

“Again the ranch is on the market and they’ve shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, ‘Give them to the real estate shark, I’m out a here,” dropping the keys in Ennis’s hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“No, they didn’t have any money, the sea was dangerous and men were lost, but it was a satisfying life in a way people today do not understand. There was a joinery of lives all worked together, smooth in places, or lumpy, but joined. The work and the living you did was the same things, not separated out like today.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”