Pretentious Quotes

“If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.”
― Charles Bukowski, Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems

“Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play.”
― Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust

“I don't use big words to show off because it's ostentatious.”
― Don Roff

“If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“There occurred within a causal radius of Brandon Station one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause. In the soul of the great blazing sun there were complicated superhuman vibrations [connected] ... with the feelings of a few intellectual sages who had enough imagination to recognise the conscious personality of this fiery orb as it flung far and wide its life-giving magnetic forces. Roaring, cresting, heaving, gathering, mounting, advancing, receding, the enormous fire-thoughts of this huge luminary surged relentlessly to and fro, evoking a turbulent aura of psychic activity.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“The height of cleverness is in one's ability to be very clever without seeming clever at all.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“He walked to the top of a rise and crouched and watched the day accrue. The chary dawn, the cold illucid world.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed from the front of the house. "What an egregious insult to good taste.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“He told me things about himself that should have made him sound urbane but did the opposite. He told me, for example, that he liked Steve Reich's music, modern-art museums, and Beat poetry. These words flew out of his mouth and went boomeranging back as if they knew they weren't meant to take the conversation anywhere but back to him. He also explained that he really liked interacting with different kinds of people. When I didn't immediately respond to this, he repeated it, and so I assured him I believed it.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“I'm tired of 'pretentious' just being used as an excuse to dismiss anything that fucking expects you to have a brain.”
― T.J. Kirk

“No one can touch us. We are unbelievable.”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land

“His knowledge of books, however superficial, was sufficient to impress upon their ignorance respect for his supposed learning;”
― Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe: Sir Walter Scott

“used tight as sutures and orné with ossiform stucco and curlicues”
― Sfarda L. Gül, Non Serviam

“Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
- Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.”
― Roedy Green

“What if this is a horrible mistake?" I croaked.
"Oh, it'll be horrible fine, just a bunch of pretentious rich people with shelves of books they've never read.”
― Ruta Sepetys, Out of the Easy

“I will take all my rights! Can you deliver them to my house?”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land

“My fear is, what is the larger effect of my book on the world and on the minds of the people who take the time to consume it? Am I contributing in a positive way to the overall kind of collective consciousness of people in the world? I worry about that.”
― Patrick Rothfuss

“Children, teenagers, and young adults frequently attempt to duplicate their cult hero’s mannerisms. Sometimes when we observe youngsters attempting to emulate the gestures and behaviors of a celebrity whom they admire, we state that they are putting on airs or engaging in pretensions. Adults tend to fob off such pretentious behavior as a frivolous act engaged in by children. In actuality, pretentious behavior is an important learning rubric for behavior and character formation. Imitation is more than a form of flattery. When young people mimic admired celebrities they are displaying telling behavior regarding what subjects spikes their interest and this in turn might provide clues to their future vocational and recreational activities. By engaging in mimicry, we are able to audition our future self. Just as many athletes begin in their youth attempting to impersonate the style of their sports idols, young people universally attempt to copy the mannerisms and behaviorisms of people whom they respect. Mimicry is one way that people feel safe exploring what persona they wish to adopt. How many rock stars and other successful people endorsed the mantra, ‘Fake it ‘till you make it.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“When I was young, all I wanted to read were pretentious little books. Camus and Tournier and Calvino. If it had a plot, I hated it.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“When you are full of yourself, you are empty.”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, Yet Another New Land

“He saw himself as a hated prier into the homes of strangers, a kind of intellectual charlatan rationalizing his own prurience into scientific curiosity; someone at once lower and more pretentious than a professional social worker.”
― Harry Sylvester, Dayspring

“I am not a titleholder; I don't steal; I don't lie...”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land

“Ed began explaining this Yo La Tengo thing, how he was listening to a record of theirs, on vinyl he emphasized, and he'd been thinking about a genre of music called shoegaze something about the body language of the shoegazer, the perpetual crumpling or downward slope of the gazer's neck, and then he changed the subject, abruptly, to nettle root—had I ever taken nettle root? I was in a subdued, semi-meditative state, but he repeated himself, louder—Mary, have you ever taken nettle root?—and I said, Um, no, to which he immediately began chanting.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“She chuckled and thought he was a pretentious buffoon. Manhattan had been lost for days. If he had not been hiding out on Long Island with his head up his ass, he’d know that.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“It’s really difficult to say anything completely true without sounding like a pretentious jackhole”
― Caliban Darklock, The BULL SHIT LIFE: Why Everything Sucks

“The audience was highly pretentious and somewhat vain at gazing deeply into what was fundamentally shallow; so in this vein with thoughts flowing, and past that vane with minds blowing, it completely missed the point.”
― Criss Jami

“Till we stop being a bunch of poncy, pretentious pillock, each obnoxious advancement will cause nothing but havoc.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans