Mary Hunter Austin Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

Who shall say what another will find most to his liking in the streets of the mountains. As for me, once set above the country of the silver firs, I must go on until I find white columbine.

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

Mary Hunter Austin
I do not know who sings my songs
Before they are sung by me.

Mary Hunter Austin
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.

Mary Hunter Austin
People would be surprised to know how much I learned about prayer from playing poker.

Mary Hunter Austin
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.

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

Mary Hunter Austin
Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.

Mary Hunter Austin
When the five coyotes that range the Tejon from Pasteria to Tunawai planned a relay race to bring down an antelope strayed from the band, beside myself to watch, an eagle swung down from Mt. Pinos, buzzards materialized out of invisible ether, and hawks came trooping like small boys to a street fight.

Mary Hunter Austin
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.

Mary Hunter Austin
None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have the lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it.

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

Mary Hunter Austin
Old Peter Prairie-Dog Builds him a house In Dog-Dog Town, With a door that goes down And down and down, And a hall that goes under And under and under, Where you can't see the lightning, You can't hear the thunder, For they don't like thunder In Dog-Dog Town.

Mary Hunter Austin
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.

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

Mary Hunter Austin
Once at Red Rock, in a year of green pasture, which is a bad time for the scavengers, we saw two buzzards, five ravens, and a coyote feeding on the same carrion, and only the coyote seemed ashamed of the company.

Mary Hunter Austin
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.

Mary Hunter Austin
Rabbits are a foolish people. They do not fight except with their own kind, nor use their paws except for feet, and appear to have no reason for existence but to furnish meals for meat-eaters. In flight they seem to rebound from the earth of their own elasticity, but keep a sober pace going to the spring. It is the young watercress that tempts them and the pleasures of society, for they seldom drink.

Mary Hunter Austin
The true desert breeds its own kind, each in its particular habitat. The angle of the slope, the frontage of a hill, the structure of the soil determines the plant.

Mary Hunter Austin
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.

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

Mary Hunter Austin
You have to beat out for yourself many mornings on the windy headlands the sense of the fact that you get the same rainbow in the cloud drift over Waban and the spray of your garden hose. And not necessarily then do you live up to it.

Mary Hunter Austin
That curious social warp which obligates us most to impeach the validity of a woman's opinion at the points where it is most supported by experience.

Mary Hunter Austin
Valleys are the sunken places of the earth, cañons are scored out by the glacier ploughs of God.

Mary Hunter Austin
I suppose that Italy must always lie like some lovely sunken island at the bottom of all passionate dreams, from which at the flood it may arise; the air of it is charged with subtle essences of romance. One supposes Italy must be organized for the need of lovers.

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

Mary Hunter Austin
The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit, and they do it hardly, or with tropical luxuriance, as the rain admits.... One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to 'try,' but to do.

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

Mary Hunter Austin
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.

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

Mary Hunter Austin