Literary notes about everything (AI summary)
The word “everything” plays a dynamic role in literature, serving as a shorthand for totality, change, or the ineffable fullness of experience. In some contexts, it emphasizes a complete, sometimes overwhelming, accumulation—as when a character recalls “everything” in a flash of realization [1] or when a household is described as having “everything” prepared for a guest [2]. At other times, “everything” conveys the sweeping, messy entirety of life’s circumstances, whether in the subtle nuances of personal ambition [3] or the sudden transformations that tilt one’s whole world on its head [4]. Across diverse genres—from the grim observations in Dostoyevsky’s narratives [5, 6] to the ironic commentary in Oscar Wilde’s works [7]—“everything” encapsulates both the promise of limitless possibility and the weight of all-encompassing experience, uniting the minutiae of daily life with the grand arcs of destiny.
- I remembered everything now.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant - The host was at his door and everything was prepared--bed, bandages, and lint; and a groom had gone to Lens, the nearest village, for a doctor.
— from Twenty years after by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet - "I want everything—everything a girl can have.
— from Rilla of Ingleside by L. M. Montgomery - But now everything is changed.
— from St. Paul's Epistles to the Colossians and Philemon by J. B. Lightfoot - And, truly, see how at first sight everything is cold, morose, as though ill-humoured among us....
— from White Nights and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - And though this seemed at first a horrible calumny, it began by degrees to appear to be justified; suddenly everything became clear.
— from Short Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.
— from Intentions by Oscar Wilde
