Misunderstood Quotes

Some quotes don’t mean what people think they mean.
Watch the Hartiverse video about misunderstood quotes here: https://youtu.be/j20AqBYfHQE
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It’s hard to explain exactly why we love quotes so much, but we do. Whether we choose to express our love for our favorite quotes on bumper stickers, magnets, t-shirts or our Facebook pages, we seem to get incredibly attached to a particular line from film, literature, or music and want to use it to represent ourselves to the world.

But what if we don’t actually understand the quote? People love to quote Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken as a poem that champions choosing “the road less traveled,” or the more challenging life path, and will often cite the poem’s final line: I took the road less traveled by and that has made all the difference.

It’s common to use the poem in support of not taking the easy way, but if you pay attention to all the lines of the poem, you’ll notice that Frost actually decides that both roads are “about the same” and he chooses his road not because it looks more difficult, but because he has to choose one of them. The poem is meant to be ironic, not inspiring, but it is frequently misinterpreted.

Another frequently misinterpreted literary quote is: Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? It’s slightly ironic that one of the most frequently repeated Romeo and Juliet quotes is also one of the most misunderstood, but it’s true. It’s often used to mean “Where are you, Romeo?” However “wherefore” is actually a synonym for “why” and not “where” and Juliet Capulet is, in reality, asking, “Why must your name be Romeo (Montague)?” Sometimes a quote isn’t necessarily misunderstood so much as it is up to interpretation.

One of the more compelling Great Gatsby quotes comes not from Gatsby himself, but from the story’s narrator, Nick Carraway, Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. From the novel’s beginning, Nick presents himself as a humble Midwesterner with good, solid values, and while the events of the novel offer little to contradict that, you might ask yourself if Nick is actually a reliable narrator.

When a novel is narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator, we often take for granted that we are getting unbiased facts, but when the narrator is first person, recounting events that have occurred in his life, it’s virtually impossible that he’s 100 percent objective. Mark Twain took the concept of the unreliable narrator and extended it to the concept of an unreliable author. It’s hard to take any of the Huckleberry Finn quotes at face value after the disclaimer that Twain included at the beginning of his book: YOU don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.

Tom Sawyer is, of course, another Twain character. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. This disclaimer is told in the voice of Huck, but is, of course, from the clever mind of Twain. A beautiful quote can express a thought or emotion that we didn’t even know we had, and it’s a great thing when we are so moved by something in literature that we want it to represent ourselves. We just need to be sure we truly understand it.

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