“Anyway, there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle.”
― Annie Proulx, quote from Close Range
“You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country--indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky--provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut...
...Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.”
― Annie Proulx, quote from Close Range
“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.”
― Annie Proulx, quote from Close Range
“There's a feeling you get driving down to Casper at night from the north, and not only there, other places where you come through hours of darkness unrelieved by any lights except the crawling wink of some faraway ranch truck. You come down a grade and all at once the shining town lies below you, slung out like all western towns, and with the curved bulk of mountain behind it. The lights trail away to the east in a brief and stubby cluster of yellow that butts hard up against the dark. And if you've ever been to the lonely coast you've seen how the shore rock drops off into the black water and how the light on the point is final. Beyond are the old rollers coming on for millions of years. It is like that here at night but instead of the rollers it's the wind. But the water was here once. You think about the sea that covered this place hundreds of millions of years ago, the slow evaporation, mud turned to stone. There's nothing calm in those thoughts. It isn't finished, it can still tear apart. Nothing is finished. You take your chances.”
― Annie Proulx, quote from Close Range
“Are you like an enchanted thing? A damn story where some girl lets a warty old toad sleep in her shoe and in the mornin the toad's a good-lookin dude makin omelettes?”
― Annie Proulx, quote from Close Range
“Big and little they went on together to Molalla, to Tuska, to Roswell, Guthrie, Kaycee, to Baker and Bend. After a few weeks Pake said that if Diamond wanted a permanent traveling partner he was up for it. Diamond said yeah, although only a few states still allowed steer roping and Pake had to cover long, empty ground, his main territory in the livestock country of Oklahoma, Wyoming, Oregon and New Mexico. Their schedules did not fit into the same box without patient adjustment. But Pake knew a hundred dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and slope country, in and out of the tiger shits, over the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange-dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog, two redheaded cowboys moving a house that filled the roadway and Pake busting around and into the ditch to get past, leaving junkyards and Mexican cafes behind, turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep.”
― Annie Proulx, quote from Close Range
“You are a knowledgeable girl,” he said, “and a damn good-lookin one, though upholstered. Care for a beer?”
― Annie Proulx, quote from Close Range
“Here’s Doc Osborne, first Democratic governor. A lynch mob hung Big Nose George Parrott back in the 1870s. Doc got the body, skinned it, tanned the hide, made himself a medical bag and a pair a shoes. Wore the shoes to his inauguration. They don’t make Democrats like that anymore.”
― Annie Proulx, quote from Close Range
“The stale coffee is boiling up but he catches it before it goes over the side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid, lets a panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong.”
― Annie Proulx, quote from Close Range
“Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives.”
― Annie Proulx, quote from Close Range
Annie Proulx
Born place: in Norwich, Connecticut, The United States
Born date August 22, 1935
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“He reached across and fingered the pendant; I felt it move against my skin. "Willow, look," He said. "We haven't talked much about what might happen, but...you know that I always want to be with you, right? I mean--no matter what."
And I had known it; I felt it every time he held me--but even so, actually hearing the words made my heart catch. "I want that, too," I said. "Always, Alex.”
― L.A. Weatherly, quote from Angel
“I am Adelina Amouteru, the phantoms whispered to my father, speaking my most frightening thoughts in a chorus of voices, dripping with hatred. My hatred. I belong to no one. On this night, I swear to you that I will rise above everything you’ve ever taught me. I will become a force that this world has never known. I will come into such power that none will dare hurt me again.”
― Marie Lu, quote from The Young Elites
“Archer turned back to me, and that familiar grin flashed over his face. “Come on, Mercer. Me, you, the cellar. What could go wrong?”
― Rachel Hawkins, quote from Spell Bound
“But why should they blame her? They should blame the men who won’t let her alone,”
― Jean M. Auel, quote from The Plains of Passage
“Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind", said Lestat with a little look of honest distress and a shake of his head. "I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I can't reach for any knowledge that I ought to possess. I feel desolate, but then knowledge returns or I seek it out in a knew source."
(...)
"But you love books, then", Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen.
"Oh, yes," Lestat said. "Sometimes they're the only thing that keeps me alive."
"What a thing to say at your age", she laughed.
"No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate," he said frankly. "And books, they offer one hope - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.”
― Anne Rice, quote from Blackwood Farm
Prince Lestat
Wayfarer
The Goddess Legacy
The Proposal
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