pretentious

in a sentence

'Juvenile hyperspace' would just refer to the behavior of juvenile dinosaurs—if you wanted to be as pretentious as possible.  (source) Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park, 1993

He had been a pretentious little thing, she thought, but he had also been oh-so-serious in a way that let her be oh-so-serious as well.  (source) Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones, 2002

Since I'd been with her, I noticed I'd started to talk differently, pretentious and prettified, like the characters in the books she loved, or like Will.  (source) Alex Flinn, Beastly, 2007

You'll sound pretentious.  (source) Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride, 2009

He also had the silly pretension of wearing a long, white powdered wig because he'd heard that the well-to-do in other worlds wore powdered wigs.†  (source) Frank Beddor, The Looking Glass Wars, 2006

His voice was unpretentious and kind, with only the slightest hint of Italian inflection.†  (source) Dan Brown, Angels & Demons, 2000

...From the beginning he had been the one marked—by brute situation as much as by any gift of his—to understand them all; and finally—he could say it now without pretentiousness and without a self-deprecatory curl of the lip, for he knew at last, knew he had never hated any of them, the hatred was mere self-defense, the howling of a child not yet ready to put on his destiny like an old wool coat—finally, he knew, he was the one who'd been marked.†  (source) John Gardner, The Sunlight Dialogues, 1972

Paul had been convinced Gary's reaction had been more than false; he thought it had been pretentiously arty.†  (source) Stephen King, Misery, 1987

She liked to watch him eat because he did it so deeply, handling and savoring things, handling utensils, chewing food thoroughly, the way he paused unpretentiously with the wineglass an inch from his lips, waiting, savoring, a sense of earth and our connection to it, that was Albert over a dish of inky squid—earth and sea and the way he looked at food in the plate, breathing it all in before he even touched a fork.†  (source) Don DeLillo, Underworld, 1997

Suddenly Ma appears, gliding into the room with an uncanny mix of star power and unpretentiousness.†  (source) Steve Lopez, The Soloist, 1995

It held even though the more prosperous preachers started to tack the pretentious title of "Doctor" in front of their name and started to spend more time at seminars than visiting the sick.  (source) Rick Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin', 1997

"The natural dominance of the master again asserted itself without pretension," wrote Van Brunt, "and we once more became his willing and happy pupils."†  (source) Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City, 2003

He was honest, and unpretentious.†  (source) John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany, 1989