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Literary notes about Difficulties (AI summary)

The word “difficulties” in literature serves as a versatile marker for obstacles—be they personal, social, intellectual, or even cosmic in scope. In many works, it signifies the personal hardships that characters must endure or overcome, as when Austen’s heroine anticipates help to settle all her difficulties ([1]) or when Tolstoy’s characters wrestle with the emotional complexities inherent in relationships ([2]). In other narratives, “difficulties” takes on a broader meaning, standing for societal and political challenges that must be confronted, as illustrated in discussions of national strife and even war ([3], [4]). Additionally, authors and philosophers alike employ the term to denote abstract or theoretical impediments—such as in Freud’s and Einstein’s examinations of procedural or scientific challenges ([5], [6]). Whether used to evoke the grit of everyday life or to frame larger, systemic issues, “difficulties” becomes a narrative device through which conflict, growth, and resolution are vividly rendered.
  1. I shall talk about it to him; he will settle for me; he will help me out of all my difficulties.
    — from Emma by Jane Austen
  2. Levin said to himself, feeling beforehand that the solution of his difficulties was ready in his soul, though he did not know it yet.
    — from Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy
  3. But, "in the settlement of national difficulties," it is said, "the last resort is war; shall we summon our wives and mothers to the battle-field?"
    — from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I
  4. Yet in fact your difficulties were at least as formidable as those of the older civilizations into whose fruitful heritage you have entered.
    — from The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie and J. Berg Esenwein
  5. There are difficulties in establishing Hume's principles, and doubts as to whether it is exactly true.
    — from The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell
  6. Cosmological Difficulties of Newton's Theory 31.
    — from Relativity : the Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein

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