Literary notes about unsteady (AI summary)
The term "unsteady" in literature is often used to convey both physical and emotional instability. It frequently appears in descriptions of faltering physicality—characters may exhibit unsteady gait or trembling hands, underscoring vulnerability in motion [1, 2, 3, 4]. At the same time, authors employ "unsteady" to illustrate wavering voices and uncertain thoughts, thereby mirroring inner turmoil or hesitance in decision-making [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. In some passages, the word even extends to encompass a broader sense of indefiniteness in character or circumstance, suggesting fragile resolve or a mind unsettled by doubt [10, 11, 12, 13]. In these ways, "unsteady" enriches narrative texture by bridging the tactile and the intangible, allowing readers to experience both the physical manifestations of frailty and the subtler, emotional fluctuations of a character's inner life [14, 15].
- The closing hour came, and they were compelled to turn out; whereupon Arabella put her arm round his waist, and guided his unsteady footsteps.
— from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy - Carepíra was foremost, having borrowed a small and very unsteady boat, of Cardozo, and embarked in it with his little son.
— from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - added the boy, noticing his father’s unsteady gait.
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - A man passed by my place of concealment with a feeble and unsteady gait.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 1 by Edgar Allan Poe - “Sir, I do not wish to act against you,” I said; and my unsteady voice warned me to curtail my sentence.
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë - “Madame,” he said, in an unsteady voice, taking her speech as a reproach, “I shall be the last to go, that is why I am here.”
— from Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac - “Is there NO hope?” said Peter, in a low, unsteady voice.
— from The Railway Children by E. Nesbit - By and by his lips trembled and his voice got unsteady.
— from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner - In a moment he spoke again, still in the low, unsteady voice.
— from Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter - If the ordinary fortune fail, she does without it, and forms another, wholly her own, not so fickle and unsteady as the other.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne - On the other hand, a weak, vacillating, one-sided, unsteady, and ignorant mind will ultimately bring the body into sympathy with it.
— from Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden - You think me unsteady: easily swayed by the whim of the moment, easily tempted, easily put aside.
— from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen - Often do I strive to allay the burning fever of my blood; and you have never witnessed anything so unsteady, so uncertain, as my heart.
— from The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - That is to say, his reflections were not so irresponsible and unsteady.
— from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol - There was a vague uneasiness associated with the word "unsteady" which she hoped Rosamond might say something to dissipate.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot