Annie Proulx Quotes

Without electricity, the air would rot.

On Mir, the lights kept going out because it had developed so many electrical problems.

I don't believe Wikipedia about anything. I don't go there for anything but keywords.

They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

The internet is just a scary place. It's better to just go to the doctor. Don't let Google get inside your head. It will do bad things to you.

Hatred is the atmosphere of hell.

The poor suffer twice at the rioter's hands. First, his destructive fury scars their neighborhood; second, the atmosphere of accommodation and consent is changed to one of hostility and resentment.

Summer came. For the books thief, everything was going nicely. For me, the sky was the color of Jews.

[W]hat suffers in the atmosphere of immediacy is analysis. What suffers in this search for speed is depth. The media in the wealthy world are becoming increasingly simplistic, superficial, and celebrity-focused.

If you really want the truth of anything, don't use Wikipedia.

I reckon that for all the use it has been to science about four-fifths of my time has been wasted, and I believe this to be the common lot of people who are not merely playing follow-my-leader in research.

The truth of the matter is that all we have to do is live long enough and we will suffer.

To deserve this fate what have I ever done?... All I want is just a little piece of mind but the angels won't have it.

When you look at the whole explosion of the Internet, the decline of print journalism, there are all of these plus-or-minus ramifications, and you have to work it out. The great thing about books is that you have a tactile thing that's there. You can download this or download that, but how long do you want to be staring at a screen for the rest of your life? You've got to have some kind of proper interface for people that's not about the screen.

Hey, look at this!" He holds up a glistening, perfect pearl about the size of a pea. "You know, if you put enough pressure on coal it turns to pearls," he says earnestly to Finnick. "No, it doesn't," says Finnick dismissively. But I crack up, remembering that's how a clueless Effie Trinket presented us to the people of the Capitol last year, before anyone knew us. As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain.

. . . why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.

Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him, and struggle with all our might against death without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?

No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.

It's been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.

There's people in hell who want ice water.

Here below is not the land of happiness: I know it now; it is only the land of toil, and every joy which comes to us is only to strengthen us for some greater labor that is to succeed.

I am dying a thousand cruel and unusual deaths as fifty pairs of eyes take me in, size me up like something that should be hanging over a fireplace in a gentleman's den.

Life sucks, and then you die.

As to the rout that is made about people who are ruined by extravagance, it is no matter to the nation that some individuals suffer. When so much general productive exertion is the consequence of luxury, the nation does not care though there are debtors; nay, they would not care though their creditors were there too.

True love, unlike popular sentimental substitutes, is willing to suffer. Love is not "luv." Love is the cross. Our problem at first, the sheer problem of suffering, was a cross without Christ. We must never fall into the opposite and equal trap of a Christ without a cross.