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The palpable sense of mystery in the desert air breeds fables, chiefly of lost treasure. ... It is a question whether it is not better to be bitten by the little horned snake of the desert that goes sidewise and strikes without coiling, than by the tradition of a lost mine.

Mary Hunter Austin

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Mary Hunter Austin
Age: 65 †
Born: 1868
Born: September 9
Died: 1934
Died: August 13
Autobiographer
Essayist
Naturalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Carlinville
Illinois
Sense
Tradition
Chiefly
Littles
Mine
Snake
Better
Air
Breeds
Little
Mystery
Snakes
Without
Question
Desert
Horned
Goes
Strikes
Bitten
Whether
Treasure
Palpable
Lost
Mines
Fables

More quotes by Mary Hunter Austin

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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.
Mary Hunter Austin
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The real wonder is not that one man should be a genius, but that every man should not be.
Mary Hunter Austin
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Life set itself to new processions of seed-time and harvest, the skin newly turned to seasonal variations, the very blood humming to new altitudes.
Mary Hunter Austin
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When a woman ceases to alter the fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of her experience.
Mary Hunter Austin
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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
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I do not know who sings my songs / Before they are sung by me.
Mary Hunter Austin
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All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God.
Mary Hunter Austin
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For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars.
Mary Hunter Austin
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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
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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
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Even the people who have it do not definitely know what genius is.
Mary Hunter Austin
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The utmost the American novelist can hope for, if he hopes at all to see his work included in the literature of his time, is that it may eventually be found to be along in the direction of the growing tip of collective consciousness. Preeminently the novelist's gift is that of access to the collective mind.
Mary Hunter Austin
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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.
Mary Hunter Austin
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No man can be stronger than his destiny.
Mary Hunter Austin
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If you ever, ever, ever meet a grizzly bear, / You must never, never, never ask him where / He is going, / Or what he is doing / For if you ever, ever dare / To stop a grizzly bear, / You will never meet another grizzly bear.
Mary Hunter Austin
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It is no use trying to improve on children's names for wildflowers.
Mary Hunter Austin
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I suppose that Italy must always lie like some lovely sunken island at the bottom of all passionate dreams, from which at the flood it may arise the air of it is charged with subtle essences of romance. One supposes Italy must be organized for the need of lovers.
Mary Hunter Austin
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Death by starvation is slow.
Mary Hunter Austin
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Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas
Mary Hunter Austin
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I suppose no man becomes a pocket hunter by first intention.
Mary Hunter Austin