Literary notes about Absorbed (AI summary)
The word “absorbed” is frequently used in literature to describe a state of complete engagement where a character’s mind or attention is entirely occupied. Authors employ it to depict individuals so deeply immersed in thought, reading, or emotional preoccupation that the surrounding world effectively recedes. For instance, characters may be lost in a book or a meditation on life, becoming oblivious to external stimuli [1, 2, 3]. At times, this inward focus suggests a retreat into personal theories or even a self-absorbed isolation [4, 5], while in other contexts it illustrates the natural process of taking something in, as when gases are physically absorbed by water [6, 7]. In each usage, the term enriches narration by highlighting how total involvement—whether in introspection, creative activity, or even physical reaction—can shape both character and atmosphere [8, 9].
- The servant handed him a book which Pierre took to be a devotional work, and the traveler became absorbed in it.
— from War and Peace by graf Leo Tolstoy - She found him stretched out on the grassy bank beside the thick fir grove that sheltered the house on the north, absorbed in a book of fairy tales.
— from Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery - Finding that Holmes was too absorbed for conversation, I had tossed aside the barren paper, and leaning back in my chair, I fell into a brown study.
— from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle - She was merely absorbed in her own exalted theories and she was not maternal.
— from The Gay Cockade by Temple Bailey - He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all.
— from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - B. Because the carbonic acid gas is gradually absorbed 295 by the water; and this effect would be promoted by shaking the receiver.
— from The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson - Heat absorbed by expansion, restored by the compression of bodies.
— from The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson - It absorbed his whole nature and made him wretched enough.
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner - Then she sat down again on her chair, and became absorbed in thought once more.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
