The Shipping News

The Shipping News

by

Annie Proulx

Themes and Colors
Love and Family Theme Icon
Redemption, Courage, and Happiness Theme Icon
Life and Death Theme Icon
Resilience and Survival Theme Icon
Modernity Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Shipping News, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love and Family Theme Icon

The Shipping News follows 36-year-old Quoyle and his family as they move from the U.S. to the remote Newfoundland coast. Due to numerous instances in which important family members have hurt or abandoned Quoyle, Quoyle believes himself to be fundamentally unworthy of love. However, Quoyle begins to rethink his views on love and family when his best friend Partridge moves to California, a move that Quoyle views as yet another abandonment. Partridge, though, is the first to show Quoyle that love can be joyful, life-affirming, and mutual. The novel follows Quoyle as he gradually learns that family can be a source of strength, and that pain and suffering shouldn’t be a relationship’s defining characteristics—at least not all the time.

Ironically, Quoyle’s rehabilitation begins when he loses most of his family: his parents take their own lives, his brother joins a cult, and his wife Petal dies in a fiery car crash. These circumstances give Quoyle a chance to rebuild. It’s a sign of how much he needs and wants a family that he impulsively follows his Aunt Agnis—his only other living relative (at least to his knowledge)—to Newfoundland. In that remote and harsh place, Quoyle finds himself surrounded by positive examples of what it means to be a family and support his loved ones. It means taking care of each other, like the Yarks and their neighbors do when they share their insurance money to rebuild their community after a fire. It means never giving up on a loved one, exemplified by Jack’s miraculous rescue of his son Dennis when it seemed like Dennis was lost at sea. It means Quoyle allowing himself to fall in love with a woman like Wavey based on admiration and mutual respect rather than sheer sex appeal. Still, the novel acknowledges that love sometimes includes feeling pain, because conflict and death are inevitable, and losing a loved one is inherently painful. However, The Shipping News still suggests that by opening oneself up to love and building relationships that are healthy and supportive, a person can find joy and security.

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Love and Family Quotes in The Shipping News

Below you will find the important quotes in The Shipping News related to the theme of Love and Family.
Chapter 1: Quoyle Quotes

The truth was Punch had noticed that Quoyle, who spoke little himself, inspired talkers. His only skill in the game of life. His attentive posture, his flattering nods urged waterfalls of opinion, reminiscence, recollection, theorizing, guesstimating, exposition, synopsis and explication, juiced the life stories out of strangers.

And so it went. Fired, car wash attendant, rehired.

Fired, cab driver, rehired.

Back and forth he went, down and around the county, listening to the wrangles of sewer boards, road commissions, pounding out stories of bridge repair budgets. The small decision of local authority seemed to him the deep workings of life. In a profession that tutored its practitioners in the baseness of human nature, that revealed the corroded metal of civilization, Quoyle constructed a personal illusion of orderly progress. In atmospheres of disintegration and smoking jealousy he imagined rational compromise.

Related Characters: Quoyle , Ed Punch
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2: Love Knot Quotes

One night he […] heard Petal come in, heard the gutter of voices. Freezer door opened and closed, clink of the vodka bottle, sound of the television and, after a while, squeaking, squeaking, squeaking of the hide-a-bed in the living room and a stranger’s shout. […]

In the morning she glared at him but he said nothing, stumbled around the kitchen with the juice pitcher. […] He smelled her damp hair. Again the tears came. Wallowing in misery, she thought. Look at his eyes.

“Oh for God’s sake grow up,” said Petal. […]

Quoyle believed in silent suffering, did not see that it goaded. He struggled to deaden his feelings, to behave well. A test of love. The sharper the pain, the greater the proof. If he could endure now, if he could take it, in the end it would be all right. It would certainly be all right.

Related Characters: Petal Bear (speaker), Quoyle , Wavey Prowse
Page Number: 16-17
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4: Cast Away Quotes

Later, some knew it as a place that bred malefic spirits. Spring starvation showed skully heads, knobbed joints beneath flesh. What desperate work to stay alive, to scrob and claw though hard times. The alchemist sea changed fishermen into wet bones, sent boats to drift among the cod, cast them on the landwash. She remembered the stories in old mouths: the father who shot his oldest children and himself that the rest might live on flour scrapings; sealers crouched on a floe awash from their weight until one leaped into the sea; storm journeys to fetch medicine—always the wrong thing and too late for the convulsing hangashore.

Related Characters: Agnis Hamm
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8: A Slippery Hitch Quotes

The aunt drove her needles furiously. Wool twitched through her fingers.

“Of course you can do the job. We face up to awful things because we can’t go around them, or forget them. The sooner you get it over with, 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.”

Sure, get over it, thought Quoyle. Ten-cent philosophy. She didn’t know what he had been through. Was going through.

Related Characters: Agnis Hamm (speaker), Quoyle , Guy Quoyle , Mrs. Mavis Bangs, Ed Punch , Dick Quoyle
Page Number: 72
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13: The Dutch Cringle Quotes

“Oh. Kay. Keep happiness in the fucking family. We were moored at Whate Crow Harbor north of Bar Harbor. That’s in Maine you know, in the United States. Way up the coast from Portland. Actually there are two Portlands, but the other is on the West Coast. Down below British Columbia. Well, Tough Baby sort of slipped her moorings at the height of this incredible storm. The sea absolutely went mad. You’ve seen how Tough Baby is built. Utterly massive. Utterly heavy. Utterly built for punishment. Well! She smashed seventeen boats to matchsticks. Seventeen.”

The woman leaned her head back and cawed.

“Didn’t stop there. You’ve seen she’s flat bottomed. […] After she absolutely made kindling out of White Crow’s finest afloat, the waves kept shoving her on the beach. […] In she’d come. Wham!”

“Wham!” said the woman. The bathrobe gaped. Quoyle saw bruises on the flesh above her knees.

Related Characters: Bayonet Melville (speaker), Silver Melville (speaker), Quoyle , Petal Bear , Billy Pretty , Guy Quoyle , Dick Quoyle , Herold Prowse
Page Number: 119-120
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20: Gaze Island Quotes

“Quoyle’s Point got quite a few known stinkers and rocks. There’s the Tea Buns, a whole plateful of little scrapers half a fathom under the water, off to the north of the Comb. Right out the end of the point there’s the Komatik-Dog. You com in on it just right It looks for all the world like a big sled dog settin’ on the water, his head up, looking around. They used to say he was waiting for a wreck, that’d he’d come to lief and swim out and swallows up the poor drowning people.”

Bunny, thought Quoyle, never let her see that one.

Related Characters: Billy Pretty (speaker), Quoyle , Bunny Quoyle
Related Symbols: White Dog
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 24: Berry Picking  Quotes

His aroused senses imbued the far scene with enormous importance. The small figures against the vast rock with the sea beyond. All the complex wires of life were striped out and he could see the structure of life. Nothing but rock and sea, the tiny figures of humans and animals against them for a brief time.

The sharpness of his gaze pierced the past. He saw generations like migrating birds, the bay flecked with ghost sails, the deserted settlements vigorous again, and in the abyss nets spangled with scales. Saw the Quoyles rinsed of evil by the passage of time. He imagined the aunt buried and gone, himself old, Wavey stooped with age, his daughters in faraway lives, Herry still delighted by wooden dogs and colored threads, a grizzled Herry who would sleep in a north room at the top of the house or in the little room under the stairs.

Related Characters: Quoyle , Agnis Hamm , Bunny Quoyle , Sunshine Quoyle, Wavey Prowse , Herry Prowse
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 38: The Sled Dog Driver’s Dream  Quotes

Quoyle let himself be dragged through the company, eyes catching Wavey’s eyes, catching Wavey’s smile, oh, aimed only at him, and upstairs to Bunny’s room. On the stairs an image came to him. 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 calm and gentle pleasure. Were his fingers closing on that one?

Related Characters: Quoyle , Bunny Quoyle , Sunshine Quoyle, Petal Bear , Wavey Prowse , Guy Quoyle , Dick Quoyle
Page Number: 315
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 39: Shining Hubcaps  Quotes

Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do. A row of shining hubcaps on sticks appeared in the front yard of the Burkes’ house. A wedding present from the bride’s father.

For if Jack Buggit could escape from a 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 midocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of the hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.

Related Characters: Quoyle , Petal Bear , Wavey Prowse , Jack Buggit , Archie
Page Number: 336-37
Explanation and Analysis: