Annie Proulx Quotes

A kind of joyous hysteria moved into the room, everything flying before the wind, vehicles outside getting dented to hell, the crowd sweaty and the smells of aftershave, manure, clothes dried on the line, your money’s worth of perfume, smoke, booze; the music subdued by the shout and babble through the bass hammer could be felt through the soles of the feet, shooting up the channels of legs to the body fork, center of everything. It is the kind of Saturday night that torches your life for a few hours, makes it seem like something is happening.

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

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.

We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. The sooner you say 'Yes, it happened, and there's nothing I can do about it,' the sooner you can get on with your own life. You've got children to bring up. So you've got to get over it. What we have to get over, somehow we do. Even the worst things.

I wish I knew how to quit you.

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.

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.

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