Literary notes about Abyss (AI summary)
In literature, “abyss” is a multifaceted term that conveys both tangible and intangible depths. It often symbolizes a profound emotional void—reflecting despair, grief, or moral downfall—as when a character is described as falling into an abyss of hopeless grief ([1]) or misery ([2], [3]). At the same time, it serves as a metaphor for the vast and mysterious gaps within human experience, bridging the chasm between certainty and doubt, or between light and darkness ([4], [5], [6]). The imagery of the abyss is equally at home in depictions of nature’s overwhelming forces—swirling torrents and yawning voids ([7], [8])—as it is in articulating the precarious balance between hope and despair in the human psyche ([9], [10]).
- A sudden flash seemed to reveal to him the extent of his calamity, and that breath from the river plunged him into an abyss of hopeless grief.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant - Into what an abyss of misery have you plunged me!
— from The Monk: A Romance by M. G. Lewis - Do you know to what an abyss I was dragging you, poor angel?
— from Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert - What means shall we employ to bridge the abyss?
— from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant - Rather look back into the eternity that gapes behind, and forward into the other abyss of immensity.
— from The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius - Between the past and the present was an ineffable abyss.
— from Twenty years after by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet - The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house.
— from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle - At a little distance from the edge could be heard the sound of the roaring, foaming waters in the yawning abyss beneath them.
— from Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen by H. C. Andersen - The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion.
— from The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2) by William James - I did not wish to abandon him at the bottom of that abyss, while, on the other hand, the instinct of preservation told me to fly.
— from A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
