Literary notes about Recollect (AI summary)
In literature, "recollect" is often employed as a versatile device to invoke memory, whether to summon a precise detail or to evoke the atmosphere of a bygone era. Authors use it both as a command urging a character to remember something important, as in [1] and [2], and as a reflective recounting of past events or sensations, seen in passages like [3] and [4]. It can underscore the character’s internal process of piecing together fragmented recollections, illustrating how memory gradually emerges into conscious thought, as demonstrated in [5] and [6]. In other contexts, it even functions to anchor broader historical or factual narratives, highlighting the interplay between personal experience and collective memory found in [7] and [8].
- “Now,” said Harriet, “you must recollect.”
— from Emma by Jane Austen - " "True," said Anne, "very true; I did not recollect; but what shall we say now, Captain Harville?
— from Persuasion by Jane Austen - I recollect I came up to father's room one evening when he was in great spirits.
— from Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen - I recollect how, for the few days I was at school, the cowardly mean-spirited fellows would laugh if ever our schoolmaster made a joke.
— from Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray - I recollect trying to think about something (about anything in the whole wide world, I was not particular) without the smallest effect.
— from American Notes by Charles Dickens - What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to recollect yourself, after starting from midnight slumber!
— from Twice-told tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne - We very well recollect the scorn with which the annual procession of the first Abolitionists was greeted in Boston, some thirty years ago.
— from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I - Had we the knowledge at our birth, or did we recollect the things which we knew previously to our birth?
— from Phaedo by Plato
