Mary Hunter Austin Quotes

United States, Writer
September 9, 1868 – August, 13, 1934.

Mary Hunter Austin (September 9, 1868 – August 13, 1934) was an American writer. One of the early nature writers of the American Southwest, her classic The Land of Little Rain (1903) describes the fauna, flora and people – as well as evoking the mysticism and spirituality – of the region between the High Sierra and the Mojave Desert of southern California.

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
- World
- Men
- Women
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.

Mary Hunter Austin
- Great
- Words

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

Mary Hunter Austin
- People
- Prayer
Death by starvation is slow.

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

Mary Hunter Austin
- World
- God
- Air
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
- Help
- Running
- Water
I suppose no man becomes a pocket hunter by first intention.

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
- Great

No man can be stronger than his destiny.

Mary Hunter Austin
- Destiny
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
- Life
- Country
- Fashion
This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough.

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

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

Mary Hunter Austin
- Growth
- Tree
- Desert