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Literary notes about break (AI summary)

In literature, the word "break" operates on multiple levels, serving as both a cause of abrupt physical disruption and a metaphor for emotional or social shifts. It can depict the forceful demolition of physical barriers, as when a structure is threatened to be torn down [1] or when silence is interrupted by a commanding voice [2]. At the same time, the term captures moments of vulnerability and change, suggesting the shattering of bonds or fragile promises [3] and even heralding a new dawn with day break signaling transformation [4]. Such varied uses—ranging from forced entry [5] to the dissolution of long-standing habits [6]—allow authors to layer their narratives with tension, renewal, and the inevitability of change.
  1. The guard instantly ordered me to unbar the doors and come out, or they would break the house down.
    — from Fox's Book of Martyrs by John Foxe
  2. The captain was the first to break the silence.
    — from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo
  3. Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break.
    — from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  4. My mother rose at day break, opened one of the windows facing the bed, and
    — from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova
  5. It doesn’t need a crowbar to break your way into society there as it does in Philadelphia.
    — from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
  6. It is hopeless, but then it is hard to break habits one has been eighteen hundred years accustomed to.
    — from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

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