Literary notes about Repulsion (AI summary)
The term repulsion in literature is employed to convey both personal and abstract forces, functioning as a powerful tool to reveal inner turmoil as well as natural laws. Authors use it to express a sudden, often visceral, rejection—be it an instinctive, emotional aversion toward a character or idea, as seen when a look or an idea evokes a deep-seated dislike [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]—or to underscore the dualistic nature of attraction and repulsion in both human relationships and physical phenomena [6, 7, 8]. In many narratives, characters experience repulsion as a complex mixture of fear, disgust, and moral disapproval [9, 10, 11, 12], while in philosophical contexts the term stretches to describe the fundamental interplay of forces that govern the natural world [13, 14].
- The sight of him brought back to me all the horror which I was not unwilling to forget, and I felt in me a sudden repulsion for the cause of it.
— from The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham - I did feel, as she said, "drawn towards her," but there was also something of repulsion.
— from Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - He could not think of Dmitri without repulsion.
— from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - That first repulsion had been really a fear of her undiscovered self, and the fear had gone to sleep.
— from Martin Eden by Jack London - But as soon as she no longer saw him, she was aware of the spot on her hand that his lips had touched, and she shuddered with repulsion.
— from Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy - The laws of clash, the effects of distance upon attraction and repulsion, all seem arbitrary collocations of data.
— from The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy by William James - Electricity transmits its inner self-repulsion to infinity, though the mass of the earth absorbs the effect.
— from The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer - Galvanism is certainly, so long as the pile is working, an aimless, unceasingly repeated act of repulsion and attraction.
— from The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer - Polina Nikolaevna gazed after her, quivering all over and twitching nervously, and in her eyes there was a look of repulsion, hatred, and pain.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of Short Stories by Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - Why had he recalled that afterwards with repulsion?
— from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Razumihin was more than ecstatic and Raskolnikov perceived it with repulsion.
— from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - There was a note of hatred and contemptuous repulsion in her words.
— from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - [7] Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.
— from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake - What produces to-day our repulsion towards "man"?—for we suffer from "man," there is no doubt
— from The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
