Mary Hunter Austin Quotes

Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.

Suddenly the world has run amok and left you alone and sane behind

I'd rather stay here with all the madmen than perish with the sadmen roaming free.

I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

ahhh the beauty of annihilation. There's nothing like it.

To sing is to praise God and the daffodils, and to praise God is to thank Him, in every note within my small range, and every color in the tones of my voice, with every look into the eyes of my audience, to thank Him. Thank you, God, for letting me be born, for giving me eyes to see the daffodils lean in the wind, all my brothers, all my sisters, for giving me ears to hear crying, legs to come running, hands to smooth damp hair, a voice to laugh with and to sing with...to sing to you and the daffodils.

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

Disney World?” Ari felt like his head was about to explode. “Disney World?” His gravelly voice rose into a harsh shriek. “They’re not on vacation! They’re on the run! They’re running for their lives! Death is following them like a bullet, and they’re on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad?

No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty.

When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh.

The best poets, after all, exhibit only a tame and civil side of nature. They have not seen the west side of any mountain.

At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

She suffers according to the digits of my hate. I hear the filaments of alabaster. I would lie down with them and lift my madness off like a wig. I would lie outside in a room of wool and let the snow cover me. Paris white or flake white or argentine, all in the washbasin of my mouth, calling “Oh.” I am empty. I am witless. Death is here. There is no other settlement.

If we lose our sanity ... We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots, the howl of the utterly lost howling their nowhereness.

all that I know is that I believe in the sound of music and the running of a horse. all else is squabble.

And travellers, now, within that valley, Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms, that move fantastically To a discordant melody, While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh — but smile no more.

I am often asked if I am not lonely on my solitary excursions. It seems so self-evident that one cannot be lonesome where everything is wild and beautiful and busy and steeped with God that the question is hard to answer.

War is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in the world.

He's right: They have to put madmen with madmen.

I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.

X. I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!” XI. I saw their starved lips in the gloam, With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side. XII. And this is why I sojourn here, Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.

I felt I was beating a rainbow to death

Although love dwells in gorgeous palaces, and sumptuous apartments, more willingly than in miserable and desolate cottages, it cannot be denied but that he sometimes causes his power to be felt in the gloomy recesses of forests, among the most bleak and rugged mountains, and in the dreary caves of a desert.

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, wherever nature led.

When the ghost comes round at midnight Well you both can have some fun He can drive you mad, he can make you sad He can keep you from the sun When they take him down, he'll be both safe and sound And the hand does fit the glove And no matter what they tell you, There's good and evil in everyone.