Literary notes about continual (AI summary)
In literature, "continual" is often used to evoke an unceasing or repetitive quality, conveying both emotional intensity and persistent action. Authors deploy the word to describe enduring moods or states, as when dread or sorrow is depicted as an ever-present force [1, 2, 3]. It also characterizes phenomena that occur without interruption—be it the rhythmic flow of nature [4, 5] or the relentless scrutiny and movement within social settings [6, 7, 8]. This subtle nuance of perpetual recurrence enriches narratives by linking fleeting moments to the broader, uninterrupted continuum of experience [9, 10].
- Thus he sat In continual dread of its downfal, And lost to every comfort.
— from A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume 1 (of 6) by Jacob Bryant - Marius had a continual sob in his heart, which said to him every moment: “Alas!”
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo - That I have great sadness and continual sorrow in my heart.
— from The Bible, Douay-Rheims, Complete - In nature there is a continual transmutation of substances.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of Short Stories by Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - (One’s arm is almost in half with continual fanning: The sweat is pouring down one’s neck in streams.)
— from A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems - The conflict was accompanied by the continual and irrepressible laughter of all who witnessed and took part in it.
— from White Nights and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - “Why should he need continual surveillance to keep him from degenerating into a drunkard and a good-for-nothing?”
— from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol - At any rate, the very doorways of his offices and shops are fenced off by queer, forbidding partitions suggestive of a continual state of siege.
— from How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York by Jacob A. Riis - Their substance is as a river perpetually flowing; their actions are in continual change, and their causes subject to ten thousand alterations.
— from The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius - In the Life of Reason, if it were brought to perfection, intelligence would be at once the universal method of practice and its continual reward.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana
