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Literary notes about evanescent (AI summary)

In literature, “evanescent” is employed to evoke the fleeting, transient quality of moments, images, and emotions that vanish almost as soon as they appear. Authors use the term to depict how personal memories or childhood incidents exist only in a brief, almost fleeting awareness ([1]), while at other times it enriches narrative descriptions by lending a rapid, shifting quality to the mental pictures recalled by the reader ([2]). It also serves to underline a bittersweet beauty in moments of intense emotion or artful creation, as when poems capture a delicate, vanishing pleasure or a transient glimpse of nature ([3], [4]). In works that examine human connections or the impermanence of social bonds, “evanescent” emphasizes the temporary nature of relationships and experiences, suggesting that even the most profound feelings or stunning sights are destined to fade away ([5], [6], [7]).
  1. Of course, we intellectually know that there are others; but to the conscious mind of most persons children are evanescent personal incidents.
    — from Concerning Children by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  2. All is loose and [128] disjointed, happy–go–lucky in narration, rapid, swift, and evanescent in the mental pictures produced.
    — from Tobias Smollett by William Henry Oliphant Smeaton
  3. Her soul went forth into the song, and one listened in rapture, touched with pain that aught so sweet should be so evanescent.
    — from Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 20. July, 1877. by Various
  4. But the picture was merely evanescent, for as the fan grew cold again the outlines vanished.
    — from The Mandarin's Fan by Fergus Hume
  5. Ridicule and derision are a kind of evanescent ostracism, a temporary exclusion from the comradeship.
    — from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park
  6. Steamer friendships are the most evanescent things on earth."
    — from In a Steamer Chair, and Other Stories by Robert Barr
  7. Conversation is an evanescent relation,—no more.
    — from Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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