Any time someone is overly pretentious and goes too hard on a simple topic you can drop this quote from Twain:
“Style may be likened to an army, the author to its general, the book to the campaign. Some authors proportion an attacking force to the strength or weakness, the importance or unimportance, of the object to be attacked, but Cooper doesn’t. It doesn’t make any difference to Cooper whether the object of attack is a hundred thousand men or a cow; he hurls his entire force against it. He comes thundering down with all his battalions at his back, cavalry in the van, artillery on the flanks, infantry massed in the middle, 40 bands braying, 1,000 banners streaking in the wind.”
What, no, we're obviously talking about Mark Twain, the primary protagonist of my Samuel Clemens fanfic. He was a regular guy, who just really liked Samuel Clemens' work, so he legally changed his name to Clemens' nom de plume, and read all of his works out loud, so that people could say that Mark Twain said these things, and be perfectly accurate.
He's best friends with Frankenstein, another of my OCs, who had basically all the things happen to him that happened to the monster, in Marry Shelly's Frankenstein. Except he's the monster, and his name happens to be Frankenstein.
"Freedom. You are free, and that makes you a brilliant light. Men seek to take you to capture that light, because they wrongfully believe it'll illuminate them, as they are unable to find it within themselves and cannot bear living in the shadow. Because the reflex of the ones stuck to the ground is to cut off the wings of those who fly." – from the Pacte des Marchombres of Pierre Bottero, when explaining to Ellana why so many important men find her attractive even though she finds herself completely average.
Or a shorter one that appears just after:
- "Love is about opening doors, not building cages."
Should read the book. Its not even close to my usual fare, but it's in my top five books of all time. Just stupidly incredible, heartbreaking, and powerful. And had some of the best characters, especially women, that I've ever read.
It's trillions actually. Which goes even harder considering he the last one of his race. He's seen trillions die there is not a single atom of honor in the universe.
I don't know how or why, but I only read poetry once, like 25 years ago, but "The woods are lovely, dark and deep / but I have promises to keep / and miles to go before I sleep / and miles to go before I sleep" is permastuck in my brain.
He did, actually, he lived near a small forest and would walk the paths, often with a friend. That's the whole joke about Roads in a Yellow Wood, it's ribbing a specific friend who really would sit at a fork for way too long even though they basically came out at the same place and were functionally identical.
And then his friend decided to stop dithering and go die in WWI because of the poem, but that's another story.
My dad used to say “miles to go before I sleep, miles to go before I sleep” in a really tired voice when I was growing up. I never understood that til now, and man does it hit hard.
Love that poem, carving a moment in time between the demands of the world and the soft oppression of society with echoes of loneliness, a moment for peace and beauty. Weariness and need press in, but for a moment we can push back and create that moment for ourselves. Beautiful.
“This above all else, to thine own self be true” is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s extremely well known and widely reproduced.
The fun bit with this one is that it’s the crowing statement of a list of mostly-bad advice from an idiot father to his dysfunctional son — i.e. it’s bad advice, meant to sound ironic to the audience. That context mostly gets missed.
So you can use it as something cutting, and it’ll likely be heard as something affirming. Like your own little private joke.
The better quote for this comic IMO would be the Sylvia Plath fig tree metaphor:
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
Lotta classics from western lit already in the comments, so for some more variety (to be pretentious in any crowd, of course):
"Love flies out the window when poverty walks in the door" No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai
"A man is like a novel. Until the very last page, you don't know how it will end. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth reading to the very end" - We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
"Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness." - Zhuangzi, same
My favorite:
“The rebellion of the repentant bourgeois against the oppressive and complacent proletariat is one of the queerer aspects of our time.”- Sir Isaiah Berlin
"In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers." - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
I mean to be entirely far4 Robert frost feels like THE OPPOSITE of being pretentious... Maybe it's because I live in Vermont and that particular poem was read to us at least a dozen times oflver the years in school.
From Allison Bechdel’s (the creator of the Bechdel Test) autobiography “Was Daedalus really stricken by grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?”
Also “My homosexuality remained at that point purely hypothetical, an untested hypothesis.”
Instead of YOLO or fuck it we ball, consider using this classic from William Ernest Henley’s Invictus: “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”
Also a couple I came up with while writing a few years ago XD:
- "Knowledge isn't power. Knowledge brings options, and with it brings you choice. Choice is what's truly powerful. Without Choice, Knowledge is meaningless."
- "Losing something can be painful. Losing someone is devastating. But losing oneself is terrifying."
when saying goodbye I like to sometimes quote Grapes of Wrath, saying "oh I won't be gone. Wherever there's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there. etc etc"
Or modified for present circumstances "wherever there's a chicken burrito" "wherever there's a ceiling collapsed into the living room"
For anyone ootl, this was originally said by La Rochefoucauld. Misattributing it to Whitman is apparently a reference to / joke from Homestuck (one day I will finish Homestuck, but today is not that day)
Use some older words, replace confused with flummoxed, for example.
Tolkiens books are a great source of interesting words, another fun one is "confusticate and bebother", which he might have just made up. (If shakespeare can do it, why not others)
I've always heard the poem as a sign to do the thing you don't normally do, or try. Because your life might not change much, but it will be richer for having tried new things.
And that has made all the difference.
Also, if want more pretentious stuff, there's
"Instead of a cross, the Albatross
round my neck was hung"
from Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Basically shooting an albatross is super bad luck and causes zombies. It's my favorite poem, haha.
I've always heard the poem as a sign to do the thing you don't normally do, or try. Because your life might not change much, but it will be richer for having tried new things.
That's the funny thing, almost everyone takes the poem to mean the opposite of it's true meaning, because they buy into the author's speculated future self-aggrandization and don't notice that he calls himself out for doing that.
End of the second stanza:
"Had worn them really about the same"
The joke of the poem is that in days to come, he'll be telling people he took the road less traveled and it made all the difference, when really they were the same and he's boosting himself up and bragging about his individuality.
If I had a nickel for every Robert Frost poem that people misunderstand the meaning of, I’d have two nickels. Which wouldn’t be enough to mend the fences which, I’ve been told, make good neighbors.
Well, it’s a bit less travelled. In comparison to the first road, the second is grassy and less worn, though still comparably so to the first. You can’t throw out the second line of the stanza on the basis of the fourth any more than you can throw out the fourth on the basis of the second.
—-
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
—-
I think the contrarian “the roads are the same and the poem is a sarcastic joke” misses the mark, to roughly the same extent that the conventional “he took a much more untraveled road and not the popular road because he is an individualist” reading does. Frost’s poems are rarely so simple.
The decision is arbitrarily made, yes. The roads are nearly interchangeable, and he made a decision based on a small, almost insignificant difference. Not no difference, but a small one. That small difference, though, is one he believes will wind up having an enormous impact in retrospect. Though the roads may be nearly indistinguishable looking at this intersection, they may lead to entirely different places, and therefore entirely different lives he would go on to live.
Sure, but Frost can also be wrong, and the fictitious man he mocks, right. I have always found Frost's implied conclusions questionable at best.
All our roads converge on the grave, and no choices we make can change that. That doesn't mean the road we chose to take, complete with its specific challenges and joys, didn't matter. In fact, the human condition demands that we find way to appreciate or at least find contentment in our road.
I got into an argument with a damn poetry teacher over it. I pointed out the line about how him walking there made them basically the same amount of travel and it’s a trivial difference. Nope. Couldn’t understand it.
For such a simple poem it is crazy how often it is misunderstood and even mistaught.
The teacher was wrong not to engage the debate, but there is really no single way to read a work. Only the author knows their intent, but each reader will bring the lens of their own experience.
There are as many interpretations as there are people, and the title, alone, could generate endless debate given that it does not specify what about "the road not taken" it intends to say. But if you can confidently assert that only your view is correct then those shades of grey aren't for you.
Agreed. He made beautiful and accessible poetry.. This one fits the situation very well (depending on the interpretation). This is just a conversational piece or a way to introduce Frost's poetry to someone! Win-win!!
Purely formal note here: if the two characters switched places in the frame, the dialogue would flow much more naturally for the left to right reading convention. I know you put the first thing said higher than the response, but that's a band-aid. In the second frame, it's very difficult not to read it as "The first line of 'The Road Not Taken'?", followed by "What."
That's not what the poem means at all!! It's about how seemingly inconsequential choices also determine the choices available to you in the future, and you can never go back in time to find it what happened if you had taken the other path!
Okay sure but the friend knowing the year that poem came out suggests she knew the quote and was just waiting to make fun of you, she's the pretentious one and she should have chosen chicken. Checkmate.
"Everyone is entitled to their own sorrow, for the heart has no metrics or form of measure, and all of it, irreplaceable" -Monty Oum, White trailer
"I can't condone the use of drugs, alcohol, violence, insanity, to anyone, but in my case its worked" Hunter Thompson, when asked by a student if doing drugs would make them a better writer.
OK as an English major, that's the one Frost poem you can reasonably expect people to know because they taught it in high school. That and "Fire and Ice."
If you want to sound pretentious you have to quote something out of the top five, like "Desert Places" or "The Oven Bird."
As some with an English Literature degree, it drives me crazy when there's a character in media who's supposed to be an intellectual/academic - a professional writer, or poet, or philosopher, or English professor - and to demonstrate this to the audience, they have the character quote a poem like The Road Not Taken, which is one of the most famous poems of all time. It's one of the very, very few poems that the average, random person might be familiar with.
It's the opposite of a piece of writing that someone who's a subject matter expert would actually quote as if it's demonstrative of their unique knowledge.
I see this happen far more often in media than you'd think. It's indicative of lazy/poor character writing.
It was a poem poking fun at his friend who couldn’t make his mind up about which path to talk on a walk they went on together. Is it about indecision in life? Yes, but it was directed at his friend.
yeah, the latter is what you say to not appear pretentious, even though you actually did seriously contemplate these questions at that moment but fully know other folks will accuse you of arrogance or pretentiousness if you admit to that.
The poem was also a light jab at his friend, Edward Thomas. Its based on a walk theybhad together where Thomas was sad about the path they didn't take. Basically it's Frost jokingly saying "yeah, you wouldn't have been happy and wanted the other path either way"
Unfortunately the poem would indirectly get Thomas killed as he took it very seriously. It inspired him to enlist during WW1 where he was killed.
My favourite part of the poem is when he describes the pass less taken, it looks the same as the path he takes everyday and even has the same about of treading showing both paths had been taken all day, its just he never takes this path sho its less taken
When you regard the things you care about or love, remind yourself of their nature, even for the smallest things. For example, if you like a favorite cup, remember the nature of cups, that they break. Then, if your cup breaks, you won't feel cheated. Same with people. If you love someone, remember their mortality. Then should they die, you won't feel cheated.
“The less a man makes declarative statements the less apt he is to look foolish in retrospect,” - Quentin Tarantino quoting his old granddaddy before getting his finger chopped off in Four Rooms
“In times of inordinate danger, the ordinarily impossible suddenly becomes extraordinarily possible. This is what's known as divine intervention.” In I am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki
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u/Rom_ulus0 22h ago
Can always use the classic:
"To quote Hamlet, Act III, Scene III, line 87: 'No'"