33 Quotes About Pretension

Every winner is inclined to think he will be triumphant forever. Every loser tends to fear that he is going to be beaten forever. But both are wrong for the same reason: Everything changes except the face of god.

Xingu!" she scoffed. "Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did—unprepared though we were—that made Osric Dane so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough to everybody!

A fig for your precious society with its bridge parties, its inane chatter, its cheap mentality; its dances and vulgar banquets; its snobbery and cheap pretension. The humblest library can show you upon a single shelf better society and far more select company than all the drawing-rooms of Europe, America, and South Africa.

Pretension, dear love, does not buy truth into lies, nor alter its course.

Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents' manners. In twenty years, they’d have country houses and children with pretentious literary names and tennis lessons and ugly cars and liaisons with hot young interns. Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.

Perhaps it is only when we realize and celebrate the intrinsic value of every human life that celebrity - true celebrity - shines most brightly. On our deathbeds, none of us will speak of the jobs we’ve held or the stuff we’ve acquired in our lifetimes; here bull markets and Nielsen ratings are irrelevant. A life-threatening illness jettisons pretension in no time flat. Death is the great equalizer. Death dares us to define what really matters.

If a person defraud you and you pretended as if you have not been cheated,you have put that person in a hot soup and his conscience will judge.

People. Falling for each others’ pretensions, fakeness and whatever various faces they can put on to wear. And then they call it love. What a fantasy. What a blasphemy. Humanity bores me.

I pick up the list of Benji's five favorite books because we've got work to do:"Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon. He's a pretentious fuck and a liar."Underworld" by Don DeLillo. He's a snob."On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. He's a spoiled passport-carrying fuck stunted in eighth grade."Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" by David Foster Wallace. Enough already."The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane. He's got Mayflowers in his blood.