Literary notes about Suffused (AI summary)
In literature, the term "suffused" is often used to evoke the gradual, almost imperceptible spreading of light, color, or emotion over a subject. It can describe a scene as natural light gently permeates a room or landscape [1, 2, 3], or denote the subtle flushing of a character’s face with feelings ranging from pleasure to shame [4, 5, 6, 7]. Authors employ the word to merge the physical with the emotional—imbuing settings with a radiant glow that transforms their ambience [8, 9] or depicting characters whose features become tinged with emotion, suggesting internal shifts that mirror external changes [10, 11, 12]. The effect is one of a soft and enveloping diffusion, a technique that deepens the sensory richness of the narrative and enhances thematic contrasts between light and darkness, calm and agitation.
- Their bodies, corpsewhite or suffused with a pallid golden light or rawly tanned by the sun, gleamed with the wet of the sea.
— from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce - It suffused the cottage with its brilliant light, except where the dark depth of the embowered porch defied its entry.
— from Sybil, Or, The Two Nations by Earl of Beaconsfield Benjamin Disraeli - The sun was just setting, the west was suffused with a golden glow, the water lay, hardly rippling to a low whispering wind, a sea of fire and glass.
— from The Merman and the Figure-Head by Clara F. (Clara Florida) Guernsey - Archer, as he looked at her, was reminded of the glow which had suffused her face in the Mission Garden at St. Augustine.
— from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton - I remember, yes, I remember you with the standard!” said Kutúzov, and a flush of pleasure suffused Prince Andrew’s face at this recollection.
— from War and Peace by graf Leo Tolstoy - Priscilla stopped speaking abruptly; she turned her head away; a dull red suffused her face and neck.
— from A Sweet Girl Graduate by L. T. Meade - Didn’t exist?” cried the poor general, and a deep blush suffused his face.
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Already she was enlivened and suffused with a glow.
— from Sister Carrie: A Novel by Theodore Dreiser - As he lay there, the window-pane that faced him, growing gradually lighter, inlaid upon the darkness a square of moon-suffused sky.
— from Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton - The ten days of the vacation were suffused with a hazy magic.
— from The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth - Remembrance is like direct feeling; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever attains.
— from The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2) by William James - He seemed to radiate an atmosphere which suffused her being.
— from Sister Carrie: A Novel by Theodore Dreiser
