A Broken Man Can Heal

“If a piece of knotted string can unleash the wind and if a drowned man can awaken... then I believe a broken man can heal.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“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.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. "I'm coming back some day," they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“It takes a year, nephew... a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing someone.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull's-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought clam and gentle pleasure. Were his fingers closing on that one?”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“One of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“Their silence comfortable. Something unfolding. But what? Not love, which wrenched and wounded. Not love, which came only once.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, and that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“It's easier to die if others around you are dying.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“What we fear we often rage against.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“By January it had always been winter.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“There was a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“Where are the reporters of yesteryear?' he muttered, 'the nail biting, acerbic, alcoholic nighthawk bastards who truly knew how to write?”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“Home after midnight from a debate on the wording of a minor municipal bylaw on bottle recycling, he felt like he was a pin in the hinge of power.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News