161 Quotes by Annie Proulx

It is a good thing for a man a hit bottom because that’s when he learns what he’s made out of.

Billy stretched and yawned, his withered neck taut again for a few seconds. “I can feel the season changing,” he said. “Drawing in. This weather change coming means the end of hot weather. Time I got out to Gaze Island and worked on me poor old father’s grave. Put it off last year and the year before.” Some sadness straining the words. Billy seemed stored in an envelope; the flap sometimes lifted, his flattened self sliding onto the table.

The long horizon, the lunging, clotted sea like a swinging door opening, closing, opening.

And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.

Plumes of smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air, elegant fountains and twisting snow devils, shapes of veiled Arab women and ghost riders dissolving in white fume.

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.

You got to think a musical instrument is human or, anyway, alive... You take a fiddle now, we say it has a neck, and in the human neck what do you find? Vocal cords like strings, where the sound comes from.

Their faces were scarified in hideous whorls and dots. As for clothing, they dressed in vegetable matter. Another.