Quotes from Mary Hunter Austin

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

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.

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.

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

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

Nevertheless there are certain peaks, canons, and clear meadow spaces which are above all compassing of words, and have a certain fame as of the nobly great to whom we give no familiar names.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

No man can be stronger than his destiny.

Death by starvation is slow.

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.

For one thing there is the divinest, cleanest air to be breathed anywhere in God's world.

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

endurance. But prospectors and Indians get a kind of a weather shell that remains on the body until death.