Pretender Quotes

When we perceive aliens as a joke to be laughed at,
they feel so pity for us on the success of their plans. ~ Toba Beta

The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment, so that, in short, the public ear is at the mercy of the first impudent pretender who chooses to fill it with noisy assertions, or false surmises, or secret whispers. What is said by one is heard by all; the supposition that a thing is known to all the world makes all the world believe it, and the hollow repetition of a vague report drowns the 'still, small voice' of reason. ~ William Hazlitt

Crown Prince Rupprecht, the heir to the throne of Bavaria who commanded the army group facing the British at the Somme, was the senior direct lineal heir of James Stuart, the Old Pretender of 1715. Had there been any Jacobites left in Britain in 1916, they would have had to regard this south German prince as their rightful king. ~ David Frum

It is not new or unusual for the real Americans, meaning those immigrants who came to America a little bit longer ago, to fear the outsiders, the pretenders, the newcomers. ~ Luis Gutierrez

I came all this way for a reason. Today is the day of salvation. Trust Jesus to save you. Then be sincere as God knows a pretender. ~ Kirk Cameron

What if I say I'm not like the others
What if I say I'm not just another one of your plays
You're the pretender
What if I say I will never surrender ~ Foo Fighters

Im gonna be a pretender the rest of my life. Pretending i dont wish every girl i kiss isnt you. Pretending i dont wish every girl i sleep with isnt you. Im gonna have to pretend i dont wish my next relationship wont be with you. Pretend that i dont wish the girl i get engaged to isnt you. Pretend i dont wish the girl i marry isnt you. Pretend i dont wish the mother of my kids to be you. Pretend its not you i want to spend the rest of my life with. Everything will be a lie the rest of my life. Thats so hard to accept. ~ Michael A. Perez

If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in! ~ Shel Silverstein

Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads. ~ Denis Leary

For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men - friends, coworkers, strangers - giddy over these awful pretender women, and I'd want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who'd like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I'd want to grab the poor guy by the lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn't really love chili dogs that much - no one loves chili dogs that much! ~ Gillian Flynn

I thought you had to go to The Hall?" she said.
"To learn?" Dar looked genuinely surprised. "No, Kale, Wulder is everywhere, therefore His lessons are everywhere."
"I know Wulder made all things, and Pretender tried to copy His work. But I didn't know Wulder is everywhere. How could that be?"
"You're thinking of Wulder as having a body and moving from place to place." Dar stood and pivoted in a circle with his arms outstretched. "Wulder is everywhere. You can see His power by recognizing His work. When a flower opens, that's His work. When the stars twinkle at night, that's His work."
He paused, facing her. He let his arms fall to his sides. "Look at me, Kale. Right now, I am standing with Wulder all around me. I'm under His protection, within His will, standing on His pledge. And Wulder is, at the very same moment, in me."
"Me, too?" asked Kale.
"Yes." Dar knelt in front of her, his earnest face only inches away.
She looked into his dark brown eyes and saw strength and peace. She wondered at his patience with her. Often her marione masters gruffly explained things they thought she should already understand.
Dar winked before he continued, his funny face serious and yet cheerful at imparting what must be old knowledge to him. "So many people don't know who Wulder is or what He's capable of doing. Their ignorance doesn't make Wulder less of a being; it makes them less. Until they know, they can't be whole."
He leaned back and sighe ~ Donita K. Paul

Be a creator not an imitator, competitor, or pretender. Real success happens when you create, collaborate, and dominate. ~ Farshad Asl

I tried to pretend that kiss meant nothing. I tried to pretend she didn't have permanent residence in my dreams. I tried to pretend I wasn't using her to feel wanted, and I tried to pretend I wasn't dying to see her again - I became the great pretender. ~ Tali Alexander

Come, my pretender, my fritter,
my bubbler, my chicken biddy!
Oh succulent one,
it is but one turn in the road
and I would be a cannibal! ~ Anne Sexton

The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine. He neither endeavours to impose upon you by the cunning devices of an artful impostor, nor by the arrogant airs of an assuming pedant, nor by the confident assertions of a superficial and imprudent pretender. He is not ostentatious even of the abilities which he really possesses. His conversation is simple and modest, and he is averse to all the quackish arts by which other people so frequently thrust themselves into public notice and reputation. ~ Adam Smith

In here, the human bosom
mine, yours, everybody's
there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me? ~ Saul Bellow

Jacobitism involved much more than a debate about the merits of a particular dynasty. Men and women were well aware that its success was almost certain to involved them in civil war. And the more politically educated knew that the Stuart Pretender was a pawn in a worldwide struggle for commercial and imperial primacy between Britain and France. ~ Linda Colley

Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn't being pious. Just practical. ~ Truman Capote

She instinctively knows that each pretender she eliminates brings her one step closer to the One, and in fact, it is not unusual to hear her use this exact terminology: The One. You can almost hear the Capitalization as she says it. ~ Michael Makai

Out into the cool of the evening strolls the pretender. He knows that all his hopes and dreams begin and end there. ~ Jackson Browne

Satan is the sower of compromise - leaving a bit of God's truth into the dirty rags of sin. Satan is the commander in deceit, Satan is the ringleader in rebellion against the faithful.
Satan is the sly serpent of temptation.
Satan is the false hope of security.
Satan is the great pretender.
Satan is the great spoiler of everything good.
And Satan wants to destroy you. ~ Billy Graham

But I am a great pretender, sometimes so good at it that I convince myself that what I pretend is what is truly real. ~ Kameron Hurley

Velutha looked down at Ambassador Insect in his arms He put her down. Shaking too.
"And look at you!" he said, looking at her ridiculous frothy frock "So beautiful! Getting married?"
Rahel lunged at his armpits and tickled him mercilessly. Ickilee ickilee ickilee!
"I saw you yesterday," she said.
"Where?" Velutha made his voice high and surprised.
"Liar" Rahel said. "Liar and pretender. I did see you. You were a Communist and had a shirt and a flag. And you ignored me."
"Aiyyo kashtam," Velutha said. "Would I do that? You tell me, would Velutha ever do that? It must've been my Long-lost Twin brother."
"Which Long-lost Twin brother?"
"Urumban, silly... The one who lives in Kochi."
"Who Urumban?" Then she saw the twinkle. "Liar! You haven't got a Twin brother! It wasn't Urumban! It was you!"
Velutha laughed. He had a lovely laugh that he really meant
"Wasn't me," he said. "I was sick in bed."
"See, you're smiling!" Rahel said. "That means it was you
Smiling means 'It was you.'"
"That's only in English' Velutha said. "In Malayalam my
teacher always said that 'Smiling means it wasn't me.'"
It took Rahel a moment to sort that one out. She lunged at him once again. Ickilee ickilee ickilee! (169( ~ Arundhati Roy

Ladles and Jellyspoons, all rise for...'TRIUMPHʼ. And by Jupiter what a triumph it is! ...
For yet again the unfeasibly huge, nay the monstrously Gigantic, creative genius of the
inimitable Mr. Greg Broadmore, delivers us from evil. Expanding the universe
according to Dr.Grordbort, which teems with its ever growing cast of splendiferous
characters, creatures, and (most importantly) weapons, and is led by the greatest
bombast in the history of fiction, Lord Cockswain himself, GBʼs latest tome of
magnificence once more separates the mere pretender from the true originator of
fantasy art. This outing has me feeling that we have reached a tipping point in the
evolution of the oeuvre, where we cannot BUT believe that this world is real, that these
microscopically detailed inventions are not fanciful conceptual constructs, but an
authentic a depiction as any of our Glorious past, present... and perhaps our future. ~ Andy Serkis

Be who you are, don't be a pretender,
if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember. ~ Freequill

As a fantasist, I well understand the power of escapism, particularly as relates to romance. But when so many stories aimed at the same audience all trumpet the same message – And Lo! There shall be Two Hot Boys, one of them your Heart's Intended, the other a vain Pretender who is also hot and with whom you shall have guilty makeouts before settling down with your One True Love – I am inclined to stop viewing the situation as benign and start wondering why, for instance, the heroines in these stories are only ever given a powerful, magical destiny of great importance to the entire world so long as fulfilling it requires male protection, guidance and companionship, and which comes to an end just as soon as they settle their inevitable differences with said swain and start kissing.

I mean to invoke is something of the danger of mob rule, only applied to narrative and culture. Viz: that the comparative harmlessness of individuals does not prevent them from causing harm en masse. Take any one story with the structure mentioned above, and by itself, there's no problem. But past a certain point, the numbers begin to tell – and that poses a tricky question. In the case of actual mobs, you'll frequently find a ringleader, or at least a core set of agitators: belligerent louts who stir up feeling well beyond their ability to contain it. In the case of novels, however, things aren't so clear cut. Authors tell the stories they want to tell, and even if a number of them choose ~ Foz Meadows

Know your job and don't fake it. It looks easy, but the ones that make it look easy know what the hell they're doing. They may tell you around the dining room table that you're funny and you should be an actor, but until you challenge yourself by getting on a stage or in front of a camera, that's when your knowledge of the craft separates you from the pretenders. ~ Dustin Diamond

Cram nailed his colours to the mast and threw down the Great Pretender ~ Ron Pickering

I don't have any training as an actor, but I guess I'm an intense pretender. When you read something over and over, it gets into you a little bit. You can't help but begin to feel it, even if you're a healthy person as I think I am. ~ John Hawkes

That Elvis, man, he is all there is. There ain't no more. Everything starts and ends with him. He wrote the book. But for him, I'd be selling encyclopedias right now. There have been a lotta tough guys. There have been pretenders. And there have been contenders. But there is only one king. ~ Bruce Springsteen

The poet is a pretender. / He pretends so completely, / that he even pretends that it is pain / the pain he really feels. ~ Fernando Pessoa

My Sadness is Deeper than Yours

My sadness is deeper than yours. My interior life is richer than yours. I am more interesting than you. I don't care about anybody else's problems. They are not as serious as mine. Nobody knows the weight I carry, the trouble I've seen. There are worlds in my head that nobody has access to: fortunately for them, fortunately for me. I have seen things that you will never see, and I have feelings that you are incapable of feeling, that you would never allow yourself to feel, because you lack the capacity and the curiosity. Once you felt the hint of such a feeling, you would stamp it out. I am a martyr to futility and I don't expect to be shut down by a pretender. Mothballs are an aphrodisiac to me, beauty depresses me. You could never hope to fathom the depth of my feelings, deeper than death. I look down upon you all from my lofty height of lowliness. The fullness of your satisfaction lacks the cadaverous purity of my pain. Don't talk to me about failure. You don't know the meaning of the word. When it comes to failure, you're strictly an amateur. Bush league stuff. I'm ten times the failure you'll ever be. I have more to complain about than you, and regrets: more than a few, too many to mention. I am a fully-qualified failure, I have proven it over and over again. My credentials are impeccable, my resume flawless. I have worked hard to put myself in a position of unassailable wretchedness, and I demand to be respected for it. I expec ~ John Tottenham

Jail is more commonly-suited to those less-commonly able to finance a defense (or to potentially pander the prosecution). The choices for council is either a retained lawyer or, by default, a public defender. In the later of these two, the common title in jail was 'public pretender'. ~ H. Kirk Rainer

I prefer to be a sad screwed stupid bitch, than a fucking liar, fake and pretender that has to put different masks per day. ~ Sara Keddar

Whether a Commonwealth suffers more by hypocritical pretenders to religion or by the openly profane? The most dangerous hypocrite in a Commonwealth is one who leaves the gospel for the sake of the law. A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law. ~ Benjamin Franklin

A fire burned in his belly with Helen's words, her challenge laid bare. Are you a king worthy of great glory, or a pretender clamoring for attention at the edge of the world? One look to Menelaus was all the reminder Agamemnon needed of how much he detested that comparison. ~ Aria Cunningham

So many people are afraid of being themselves so they're stuck in the world as a pretender ~ Surgeo Bell

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender. ~ Philip Guedalla

He is my brother," I said. "I cannot desert him."
"You can go to your own death," William said. "Or you can survive this, bring up your children, and guard Anne's little girl who will be shamed and bastardized and motherless by the end of this week. You can wait out this reign and see what comes next. See what the future holds for the Princess Elizabeth, defend our son Henry against those who will want to set him up as the king's heir or even worse-flaunt him as a pretender. You owe it to your children to protect them. ~ Philippa Gregory

There are pretenders to piety as well as to courage. ~ Moliere

Never trust a sentimentalist. They are all alike, pretenders to virtue, at heart selfish frauds and sensualists. ~ Jack Butler Yeats

I always see myself as a character actor, but Remington Steele was me. I gave up on trying to be any character. I just put myself as me in this world of Remington Steele and the grand pretender. ~ Pierce Brosnan

I had long since insisted upon interpreting the things that Fate forced me to do as victories of my own will and intelligence, and now this bad habit had grown into a sort of frenzied arrogance. In the nature of what I was calling my intelligence there was a touch of something illegitimate, a touch of the sham pretender who has been placed on the throne by some freak chance. This dolt of a usurper could not foresee the revenge that would inevitably be wreaked upon his stupid despotism. ~ Yukio Mishima

I have worked in the homes of many successful people and have seen firsthand that everyone fails in life, but failure can be a gift if you don't give up and are willing to learn, improve, and grow because of it. You see, failure often serves as a defining moment, a crossroads on the journey of your life. It gives you a test designed to measure your courage, perseverance, commitment, and a dedication. Are you a pretender who gives up after a little adversity or a contender who keeps getting up after getting knocked down? ~ Jon Gordon

The real leaders intend to do definitely that good task for which a pretender has provoked them by saying that it can't be done, but the good number of pretenders tend to do only that job for which a real leader has cautioned them by showing the things that should not be done. ~ Anuj

The lover I am; it befits me to burn;
but what is the reason for your weeping and burning?
The candle replied: 'Oh my ill-fated lover,
a honey-sweet [shirin] friend went away from me.
Someone like Shirin has deserted me;
there is fire on my head, as it was on Farhad's.'
The candle continued, while a painful flood
each moment gushed down on his yellow cheeks:
'Pretender, this love is not your game,
as you have no patience, no strength to stand.
Untouched you shrink from a single flame,
whereas I stand still until I am consumed.
If the fire of love has scorched your wings,
look at me: it burned me from head to foot. ~ Saadi

Say a prayer for the pretender, who started out so young and strong only to surrender. ~ Jackson Browne

The ragamuffin gospel reveals that Jesus forgives sins, including the sins of the flesh; that He is comfortable with sinners who remember how to show compassion; but that He cannot and will not have a relationship with pretenders in the Spirit. ~ Brennan Manning

I often feel like a pretender when wearing makeup. The most beautiful features in a woman are her character and her experiences. Why hide that? ~ Masiela Lusha

I am Valentine's son. Jonathan Christopher Morgenstern. You never had any right to that name. You're a ghost. And a pretender. ~ Cassandra Clare

Even if I am but a pretender to wisdom, that in itself is philosophy. ~ Diogenes

The great difference between the real leader and the pretender is that the one sees into the future, while the other regards only the present; the one lives by the day, and acts upon expediency; the other acts on enduring principles and for the immortality. ~ Edmund Burke

A man of knowing attains to a sense of humour. Let this always be remembered. If you see someone who has no sense of humour, know well that that man has not known at all. If you come across a serious man, then you can be certain that he is a pretender. Knowing brings sincerity but all seriousness disappears. Knowing brings a playfulness; knowing brings a sense of humour. The sense of humour is a must. ~ Rajneesh