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Literary notes about flexible (AI summary)

The term “flexible” in literature is employed both as a descriptor of physical dexterity and as a metaphor for adaptability and resilience. Authors use it to capture the fluidity and dynamism of bodily movement—for instance, a high, flexible neck that brings a creature vividly to life [1] or a voice described as “smooth and true, flexible and full” [2]. At the same time, it extends to the abstract realm, suggesting the capacity to yield, adjust, and transform, whether in reference to a character’s temperament, the pliability of intellectual constructs [3], or even the malleable structure of societal systems [4]. In other contexts, “flexible” characterizes the material properties of objects like cloth [5] or technical components [6], reinforcing the idea that versatility and ease of adaptation are prized qualities in both animate and inanimate forms.
  1. Once upon a yellow sandbank I saw a creature like a huge swan, with a clumsy body and a high, flexible neck, shuffling about upon the margin.
    — from The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle
  2. The same method applies to singing; make his voice smooth and true, flexible and full, his ear alive to time and tune, but nothing more.
    — from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  3. This story may serve, by the way, to let us see how flexible our reason is to all sorts of images.
    — from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne
  4. They give to human society that strong and yet flexible organization which is the necessary condition for its successful development.
    — from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park
  5. Each volume, cloth flexible, 2 s. ; or sewed, 1 s. 6 d. (Catalogues post free on application.) —— (B.) German and English Dictionary.
    — from British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions by Wirt Sikes
  6. Château-Renaud contented himself with tapping his boot with his flexible cane.
    — from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet

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