Mary Hunter Austin > Quotes

“We are not all born at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later... Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.”
― Mary Austin

“If you find holes in my book that you could drive a car through, do not be too sure they were not left there for that express purpose.”
― Mary Austin, The Land of Journeys' Ending

“But there is one tree that for the footer of the mountain trails is voiceless; it speaks, no doubt, but it speaks only to the austere mountain heads, to the mindful wind and the watching stars. It speaks as men speak to one another and are not heard by the little ants crawling over their boots. This is the Big Tree, the Sequoia.”
― Mary Austin, California, the Land of the Sun

“There is another sort of beauty playing always about the Pueblo country, beauty of cloud and rain and split sunlight... Everywhere peace, impenetrable timelessness of peace, as though the pueblo and all it contains were shut in a glassy fourth dimension, near and at the same time inaccessibly remote.”
― Mary Austin

“He did not venture to say anything more,”
― Mary Austin, The Basket Woman A Book of Indian Tales for Children

“If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in the loneliest land that ever came out of God's hands, what they do there and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there. 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 Austin, The Land of Little Rain

“I do not know just how long it takes to become saturated with the elements so that one takes no account of them. Myself can never get past the glow and exhilaration of a storm, the wrestle of long dust-heavy winds, the play of live thunder on the rocks, nor past the keen fret of fatigue when the storm outlasts physical endurance.”
― Mary Hunter Austin

“I suppose," he thought, "it is not good for me to flower as the other plants. If I began like them I should probably end like them, and I feel that I could not be satisfied with that. After all, one should not try to be so much like others, but to be the very best of one's own sort.”
― Mary Hunter Austin, The Basket Woman A Book of Indian Tales for Children

“There is nothing," he said to the sapling firs, "like being able to endure hard times with a good countenance.”
― Mary Hunter Austin, The Basket Woman A Book of Indian Tales for Children

“endurance. But prospectors and Indians get a kind of a weather shell that remains on the body until death.”
― Mary Hunter Austin, The Land of Little Rain

“Trust Indians not to miss any virtues of the plant world! Nothing”
― Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain

“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. Men who have lived there, miners and cattlemen, will tell you this, not so fluently, but emphatically, cursing the land and going back to it. For”
― Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain

“perpetuity.”
― Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain