Literary notes about REST (AI summary)
The term “rest” appears with diverse meanings throughout literary works, functioning both as a marker for what remains and as a signal for pause, respite, or even finality. In some writings it quantifies the remaining items or persons—indicating, for instance, those left after accounting for a specified number ([1], [2], [3])—while in others it conveys the cessation of activity or life, as when characters find peace or surrender to sleep ([4], [5], [6]). At times “rest” is used to structure narrative transitions, underscoring the balance between the prominent and the peripheral ([7], [8], [9]), and in epic or historical texts it often hints at destiny or the inevitable cycle of endurance and decline ([10], [11]). This multiplicity of senses enriches the text, offering layers of meaning where “rest” seamlessly bridges the literary depiction of the remaining parts and the serene moments of pause.
- In the hive there is one married bee, called the queen; she has fifty thousand children; of these, about one hundred are sons; the rest are daughters.
— from What Is Man? and Other Essays by Mark Twain - Some of it is thrown on the fire in the name of the village gods and deceased ancestors; the rest is eaten by the family.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer - She was ashamed, and she would have been yet more ashamed of her father than of all the rest.
— from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen - Ah, it's an ill conscience that's such an enemy to rest!
— from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson - His friends mourn and weep, but he is at rest: he does not now feel the murderer’s grasp; a sod covers his gentle form, and he knows no pain.
— from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - I sat down to rest myself, and began to look around.
— from Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker - What is characteristic in the word we is the opposition of a larger or smaller group of which the I is a member, to the rest of the universe.
— from Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students by Hans Gross - Lady Cressida had evidently insisted on walking home, and the rest of the church-goers had thought it their duty to accompany her.
— from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton - In which sense there is nothing that accordeth not with the rest of Holy Scripture, or any glimpse of the fire of Purgatory.
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes - Meanwhile Achilles continues the slaughter, drives the rest into Troy:
— from The Iliad by Homer - And the rest of the acts of Joas, and all that he did, are they not written in the book of the words of the days of the kings of Juda?
— from The Bible, Douay-Rheims, Complete
