48 Quotes by 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Some think that even the ancients who lived long before the present generation, and first framed accounts of the Gods, had a similar view of nature; for they made the Oceanus and Tethys the parents of creation, and described the oath of the Gods as being by water, to which they give the name of Styx; for what is oldest is most honourable, and the most honourable thing is that by which one swears

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

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.