“The road less traveled is sometimes fraught with barricades, bumps, and uncharted terrain. But it is on that road where your character is truly tested”

[199709241628.JAA08908@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Bronze Beta web message board, (14 February 2004) http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~hsiao/media/tv/buffy/bronze/20040214.html;after Whedon's discovery that The WB had cancelled Angel. Compare: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken" (1916).
Context: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN' SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn.

Source: On the Road: The Original Scroll

Antes de recorrer mi camino yo era mi camino.
Voces (1943)

Cellar Door, Spring 1985, Vol. 12(2), p. 50.

Source: Poem "The Road Not Taken"
Context: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
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.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Bion, 49.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 4: The Academy

Source: Club Dead

Letter to Vernon Prichard (27 August 1942), published in The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower (1970) edited by Alfred Dupont Chandler, p. 505
1940s
Context: This is a long tough road we have to travel. The men that can do things are going to be sought out just as surely as the sun rises in the morning. Fake reputations, habits of glib and clever speech, and glittering surface performance are going to be discovered.