Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Austin

Austin’s line has the dry snap of a frontier moralist catching you mid-rationalization. “I suppose” is doing sly work: it’s the soft glove over a hard judgment, a way to accuse without sounding accusatory. And “by first intention” is the blade. It suggests that the pocket hunter - the petty thief, the opportunist who lifts what isn’t his - isn’t born from a single dramatic decision but from a drift: small compromises, a little hunger, a little envy, a little self-pity, repeated until character becomes habit.

The phrase “pocket hunter” matters, too. It’s vivid, almost folksy, turning theft into a kind of sport. That metaphor is the point: it exposes how easy it is to aestheticize wrongdoing once it’s routine, to treat predation as mere cleverness. Austin’s West isn’t the mythic arena of clean heroism; it’s a social ecosystem where scarcity and improvisation press people into moral gray zones. In that world, the most dangerous lie isn’t “I meant to do evil.” It’s “I didn’t mean to.”

Subtextually, she’s also describing how communities excuse harm. If no one “first intends” to become a pocket hunter, then everyone can claim the comfort of accident and necessity. Austin refuses that comfort. Her sentence leaves you with an unsettling thought: intention may start the story, but it doesn’t end it. Responsibility doesn’t wait for a grand vow; it accrues quietly, like dust in a pocket.