161 Quotes by Annie Proulx

Gammy Bird was a hard bite. Looked life right in its shifty, bloodshot eye. A tough little paper. Gave Quoyle an uneasy feeling, the feeling of standing on a playground watching others play games whose rules he didn't know.

Well known how violent it is in the States. Worst you'll get here,' said Jack, 'is a good punch-up and maybe your car pushed over the cliff.

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.

... but there's other things in the sea that's a mortal danger, and they can never have names because they shift and prowl and vanish.

We don't make the decisions, just does what we're told where and when we're told. We lives by rules made somewhere else by sons a bitches don't know nothin' about this place.' A hard exhalation rather than a sigh.But, Quoyle thought, that's how it was everywhere. Jack was lucky he'd escaped so long.

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.

All must pay the debt of nature.

She meant well. But knew nothing about children and the anguish they suffered.

Hard for Bunny who still measured events on a child's scale of fair and unfair.