A biography for Mary Hunter Austinhasn’t been written yet.
“This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough.”
“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.”
“I suppose no man becomes a pocket hunter by first intention.”
“People would be surprised to know how much I learned about prayer from playing poker.”
“Probably we never fully credit the interdependence of wild creatures, and their cognizance of the affairs of their own kind.”
“Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas.”
“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.”
“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.”
“No man can be stronger than his destiny.”
“Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise.”
“Death by starvation is slow.”
“The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and the land will not be lived in except in its own fashion.”
“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.”
“For one thing there is the divinest, cleanest air to be breathed anywhere in God's world.”