Literary notes about Room (AI summary)
Throughout literature, the word "room" is employed not only as a physical setting but as a dynamic element that shapes mood and meaning. It can vividly describe a contrasting atmosphere—a whitewashed kitchen juxtaposed with a dark, beam-laden dining room [1]—or mark a character’s deliberate movement and isolation, as when a man steps into a dimly lit space with his candle [2]. Some authors imbue a room with almost inexpressible qualities, such as an odor defying language [3], while others use it to evoke intimacy or personal reclusion, whether in the secret sanctum of a hotel room [4] or in the remembered spaces that haunt the mind [5]. Even beyond its role as a mere backdrop, the room becomes a stage where political, social, and psychological dramas unfold—from whispered conspiracies in drawing-rooms [6] to the subtle shifts between public and private spheres.
- Because the kitchen was whitewashed, but the dining-room was dark wood from floor to ceiling, and across the ceiling there were heavy black beams.
— from The Railway Children by E. Nesbit - He advanced to the middle of the room, with the candle still in his hand: he looked about him—but he never looked back.
— from The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins - The first room exhales an odor for which there is no name in the language, and which should be called the odeur de pension .
— from Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac - When the others had gone away, when he and she were in their room in the hotel, then they would be alone together.
— from Dubliners by James Joyce - I have never forgotten that room; for when I have terrible dreams, it comes back, just as it was.
— from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens - "Your room adjoins mine," said he, opening a door, "and mine opens into the drawing-room that we have just quitted.
— from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne