Mary Hunter Austin Quotes

For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars.

Man is not himself only...He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources...He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys.

Genius . . . arises in the natural, aboriginal concern for the conscious unity of all phenomena.

This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough

Death by starvation is slow.

Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas

As I walk .. as I walk .. / The universe .. is walking with me .. / Beautifully .. it walks before me .... / Beautifully .. on every side .... / As I walk .. I walk with beauty.

Over the tops of it, beginning to dusk under a young white moon, trailed a wavering ghost of smoke, and at the end of it I came upon the Pocket Hunter making a dry camp in the friendly scrub.

The real wonder is not that one man should be a genius, but that every man should not be.

The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and the land will not be lived in except in its own fashion.

What women have to stand on squarely [is] not their ability to see the world in the way men see it, but the importance and validity of their seeing it in some other way.

I am not sure that God always knows who are his great men; he is so very careless of what happens to them while they live.

Probably we never fully credit the interdependence of wild creatures, and their cognizance of the affairs of their own kind.

When a woman ceases to alter the fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of her experience.

No man can be stronger than his destiny.

Ride your emotions as the shallop rides the waves; don't get upset among them. There are people who enjoy getting swamped emotionally, just as, incredibly, there are people who enjoy getting drunk.

It is no use trying to improve on children's names for wildflowers.

Even the people who have it do not definitely know what genius is.

To underestimate one's thirst, to pass a given landmark to the right or left, to find a dry spring where one looked for running water - there is no help for any of these things.

I do not know who sings my songs / Before they are sung by me.

Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise.

I suppose no man becomes a pocket hunter by first intention.

Man learned to resort to the dance when he felt helpless or fragmentary, when he felt dislocated in his universe.

It is always so much easier to be moral than it is to be spiritual.

Genius may be for an hour or a thousand years; its indispensable quality is continuity with the life-push.

Life set itself to new processions of seed-time and harvest, the skin newly turned to seasonal variations, the very blood humming to new altitudes.

In the common esteem, not only are the only good aboriginals dead ones, but all aboriginals are either sacred or contemptible according to the length of time they have been dead.