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Literary notes about torment (AI summary)

The word “torment” is employed in literature as a multifaceted term that captures both physical affliction and inner emotional agony. In some works it conveys deliberate cruelty or punishment—for instance, a character questioning the morality of inflicting pain on a spouse ([1]) or suffering from a relentless internal ache that reduces intellectual capacity to mere feeling ([2]). At times, it illustrates the paradoxical interplay of pleasure and pain, as in the depiction of love’s dual nature ([3], [4]). Other narratives use the term to describe an overwhelming sense of mental or natural distress, whether it be the harsh glare of the sun causing discomfort ([5]) or the self-imposed anguish of a troubled soul ([6]). This broad usage reflects literature’s capacity to articulate the many dimensions of suffering and the human condition.
  1. As soon as the door was shut, he said: “You must be mad, surely, to torment your husband as you do?”
    — from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant
  2. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment.
    — from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
  3. Oh! what was love made for, if ‘tis not the same Through joy and through torment, through glory and shame?
    — from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition by Edgar Allan Poe
  4. As soon as I found this, I fell in Love with Chloe, who is my present Pleasure and Torment.
    — from The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson
  5. The sun, for one thing, as the Brazilian had predicted, proved a torment against which double awnings faced with green were of small avail.
    — from The Best Short Stories of 1917, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story
  6. Everything is in a tangle in my brain; I torment myself and grow stupid.
    — from Project Gutenberg Compilation of Short Stories by Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

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