Mary Hunter Austin Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

The arc of my mind has an equal swing in all directions. I should say the same of your mind if I thought you would believe it. But we are so saturated with the notion that Time is a dimension accessible from one direction only, that you will at first probably be shocked by my saying that I can see truly as far in front of me as I can see exactly behind me.

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

Mary Hunter Austin
All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God.

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

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

Mary Hunter Austin
If you ever, ever, ever meet a grizzly bear,
You must never, never, never ask him where
He is going,
Or what he is doing;
For if you ever, ever dare
To stop a grizzly bear,
You will never meet another grizzly bear.

Mary Hunter Austin
'A man,' says Seyavi of the campoodie, 'must have a woman, but a woman who has a child will do very well.'

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

Mary Hunter Austin
Religion, to be a factor in experience, must be pleasurable.

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

Mary Hunter Austin
The palpable sense of mystery in the desert air breeds fables, chiefly of lost treasure.... It is a question whether it is not better to be bitten by the little horned snake of the desert that goes sidewise and strikes without coiling, than by the tradition of a lost mine.

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

Mary Hunter Austin
The utmost the American novelist can hope for, if he hopes at all to see his work included in the literature of his time, is that it may eventually be found to be along in the direction of the growing tip of collective consciousness. Preeminently the novelist's gift is that of access to the collective mind.

Mary Hunter Austin
Come away, you who are obsessed with your own importance in the scheme of things, and have got nothing you did not sweat for, come away by the brown valleys and full-bosomed hills to the even-breathing days, to the kindliness, earthiness, ease of El Pueblo de Las Uvas.

Mary Hunter Austin