"Obliterate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of David, they then started for the Indian woman's hut; while Flora set to work to carry away and obliterate all signs, from the hut, of its late residents. After a few minutes' walking, the boys arrived at the Indian hut. It was constructed simply, of boughs of ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... a run over to the Bar L-M, to look things over. It was by no means the first time he had said this, and the girl felt that he had no particular reason to suspect her to-day. It was still snowing, not too heavily for one to venture out, but steadily enough to obliterate ski tracks entirely in less than an hour. Johnson left the house, and a little later Wanda set forth, her preparations swiftly made. Johnson was out of sight. She drove on swiftly to a hilltop due east of the house from which she ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... as one may call it, in comparison with the great historical cycles—has so separated their thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual dangers, nor steamers, nor railways, nor all the king's horses and all the king's men, seem able to obliterate the broad distinction. In the trituration of another century or so the corners may disappear; but in the meantime, in the year of grace 1871, I was as much in a new country as if I had been walking out of the Hotel St. ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the train or at latest upon its arrival in Paris the next morning. For the present he was weary of the sight of the fat Apache, glad to believe he had seen the last of him for some hours; he had much to do on his own part, nothing less in fact than utterly to obliterate from human ken ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... the Hampton Court plan. Follow, say to the right, the path indicated by the dotted line, and what I have said is clearly correct if we obliterate the two detached parts, or "islands," situated on each side of the star. But as these islands are there, you cannot by this method traverse every part of the maze; and if it had been so planned that the "centre" was, like the star, ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... distance of time we cannot succeed in forming any clear idea as to their individual temperament and character. The monuments record such achievements as they took pride in, in terms of uniform praise which conceal or obliterate the personality of the king in question; it is always the ideal Assyrian sovereign who is held up for our admiration under a score of different names, and if, here and there, we come upon some trait which indicates the special genius of this or that monarch, we may be sure that ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... that she had spared him, and that he had not followed her to those terrible rooms in the Villa des Palmes, that he knew nothing of those seven days. She would have endured any suffering, paid any price to obliterate the memory of them. It was horrible to think how nearly Horace had been there. Horace of all people—the fastidious, the immaculate, the merciless. If she had found it hard to judge her dead father tenderly, she knew what Horace's ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... school. I had known Tom Reddon in Chicago. He won my love. I cannot deny it, although I despise him to-day more deeply than I ever expect to hate again. He was even more despicable than my stepfather. Without the faintest touch of pity, he set about to obliterate every chance Rosalie could have had for restitution. Time began to prove to me that he was not the man I thought him to be. His nature revealed itself; and I found I could not marry him. Besides, my mother was beginning to repent. She awoke from her stupor of indifference and strove in every way ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... cruelly. Could I never obliterate that wretched memory? It was vivid with her; it clung to me. It seemed a shadow dogging my present pleasure. I stopped suddenly on the staircase and took her wholly into my arms. All the supple form yielded at my touch, till it leaned hard against my own; the face, pallid with excitement, was raised ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... could not last long. The jeering laughter changed to threats and curses, and then suddenly the colossus made a terrific round-arm all-embracing swipe at that small man, calculated to obliterate him once for all. But he wasn't there when it arrived; and, to Dick's joy and amazement, he saw the little Jew dodge in under the stroke, and with a spring and a lightning blow on the point bring down the big bully with a crash to ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... distinct, and more deeply engraven on the soul, so is this notion of man's duty of worshipping God clear and imprinted on the soul, and whenever the actions of men do prove that the conception of the worship of God is obliterate or worn out,—whenever their transgressions do witness that a man hath not a lively notion of this duty of God's worship,—that doth also prove that the very notion of a godhead is worn out, and cancelled in the soul, for how could souls conceive of God as ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... Bond Saxon, muttering and shaking his clenched fists, passed beyond him toward the woman. Lloyd Fenneben's own fists clenched, but he sat stone still. The woman seemed to melt into the bushes and obliterate herself entirely, while the drunken man stalked unsteadily on toward where she had been. Then shaking his fists vehemently at the pigeons, he skulked around the bend ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... laurel wreath, and that was enough, surely, to obliterate the past. It should and must be enough; and it was this thought which blazed from Hartmut's eyes as he looked toward the ambassador's box ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... achievement in locating the place as of the highest importance. They had run their two automobiles noiselessly up the lane leading from the main road until they were perhaps half a mile distant from the house and then had concealed them in the woods near-by, being careful to obliterate all traces of the wheel tracks where they had left the lane. Making a detour among the trees they had reached their present position not more than three hundred yards away from the buildings. They had carried the rifles with them, and these now were close at ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... And live to work—work to live. And strive and strive and strive to obliterate the image of ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... is not only one of the most elegantly-formed, but one of the most beautifully-coloured fishes, when taken out of the sea, that we have. Death, in some degree, impairs the vivid splendour of its colours; but it does not entirely obliterate them. It visits the shores of Great Britain in countless shoals, appearing about March, off the Land's End; in the bays of Devonshire, about April; off Brighton in the beginning of May; and on the coast of Suffolk about the beginning ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... you call them," said he, "have been laid for forty years or more. They are now ruts. I cannot obliterate them ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... public life. Any protest was treated as "incitement against the Magyar State Idea" and was made punishable by two years' imprisonment. It was as though a narrow-minded English Administration should set itself to obliterate all traces of Scottish, Welsh, and Irish national feeling; or as though the Government of India should ignore the existence of all save one race and language ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... abroad has shown a keener or a better cultivated liturgical instinct, is afraid that a free use of all the liberties permitted by the new rubrics of the daily offices would so revolutionize Morning and Evening Prayer as practically to obliterate the line of their descent from the old monastic forms. If there were valid ground for such an expectation the alarm might be justifiable; but is there? The practical effect of the rubrics that make for abbreviation will be to give us back, on weekdays ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... Chinese and Korean blood, but had developed a distinct nationality and kept their ancient Ural-Altaic language. In China the Manchus retained their separate nationality and semi-military organization. It was not until the early years of the 20th century that steps were officially taken to obliterate the distinction between the two races. The Manchus are a more robust race than the inhabitants of central and southern China, but resemble those of northern China save that their eyes are horizontally set. They are a lively and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... chairs and tables, tapestries that crumble as you touch them—the ashes and relics of many generations. Gustave says we will sweep these poor vestiges away, and begin a new life, when I come to Cotenoir; but I cannot find it in my heart to obliterate every trace of those dead feet that have come and gone in all the dusky passages ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... than his own learning. Such manners as these, not only in the particular instances which I have mentioned, but likewise in all others, shock and revolt that little pride and vanity which every man has in his heart; and obliterate in us the obligation for the favor conferred, by reminding us of the motive which produced, and the ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... She answered quietly, and was met by a surprise and curiosity which evinced that he was greatly drawn towards her case. This alarmed her. She did not wish to be the object of any one's notice. On the contrary, she desired to obliterate herself; to be counted out so far as all these people were concerned. But above all, she was anxious not to rouse suspicion. So she stopped and talked as naturally as she could about Miss Huckins's accident and what the prospects were for the night. These were favourable, or so ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... has swung himself out, abashed by my refusal, embarrassed by the unusual size of his legs and his heart, I sit down in a corner, seized with shivering. Then I obliterate myself in another corner, equally forlorn. It seems as if Marie has gone away with all I have. I am in mourning and I am all alone, ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... memory in the most bitter terms; ordering ladders to be brought in, and his shields and images to be pulled down before their eyes, and dashed in pieces upon the floor of the senate-house passing at the same time a decree to obliterate his titles every where, and abolish all memory of him. A few months before he was slain, a raven on the Capitol uttered these words: "All will be well." Some person gave the following ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... moistening the palm of his hand hastily, to obliterate the word; and not content with smearing it out, rubbing and planing all trace of it away with his coat-sleeve, until the very colour of the chalk was gone from the table. 'Now, I hope you're contented, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... The surplus earth removed from the hole he carried away to be emptied far from the spot. For Collins knew the qualities of his prey and a good wolfer leaves no sign. He had used no foolish scent to disguise his own, knowing that the heat of day and the frost of night would diffuse his scent and obliterate all trace of it, the same as an animal's trail grows cold in time, while any foreign odor lingering longer than his own would only serve as a guide for the cunning ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... intellectual display of Mr. Hawkins in this affair, there was very little outspoken criticism at the moment. In a few weeks the whole thing was forgotten, except as part of the necessary record of Hawkins's blunders, which was already a pretty full one. Again, some later follies conspired to obliterate the past, until, a year later, a valuable lead was discovered in the "Blazing Star" tunnel, in the hill where he lived; and a large sum was offered him for a portion of his land on the hilltop. Accustomed as ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... last arrow had sunk to the feather. "It's a' havers, ony gait," she quickly resumed. "I div not believe ye hae ae drap o' her bluid i' the body o' ye, man. But," she hurried on, as if eager to obliterate the scoring impression of her late words—"that she's been sayin' 't, there can be no mainner o' doot. I saw her mysel' rinnin' aboot the toon, frae ane till anither, wi' her lang hair doon the lang back o' her, an' fleein' i' the win', like a body dementit. The only question is, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... "Give me but a chance, and I will whisper a lay of love in the fair beauty's ear that will obliterate the image you have been engraving on her heart. She has listened to you, no other splendid fellow being by, but when I enter the lists look well to your seat in her affections, for I am no timid knight when a fair hand or smile is ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... as well as Gregory the hell that awaited them outside. To accept so terrible an ordeal seemed like a purification of her dishonor. If she died, she would die unstained; if she lived, it would be after such a bridal that would obliterate her tie to the sot below. Then, on the eve of her giving way, as every line in her body showed her longing, as her head drooped as though to find a resting place on the breast of the man she loved, she suddenly called up all her ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... have indeed argued from the Mosaic narrative that because the Creator, by one supernatural act, with the express purpose to form separate peoples, had divided all tongues into their present varieties, and could, by another similar exercise of power, obliterate all but one which should be universal, the fact that he had not exercised that power showed it not to be his will that any man to whom a particular speech had been given should hold intercourse with another miraculously set apart from ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... no particular reason why it should be eradicated, since it exists, and does no harm to any one, but it is a singular fact and worthy of remark. It is one of those many relics of old times, which no amount of outward change has been able to obliterate. A cardinal in Rome occupies a position wholly distinct from that of any other dignitary or hereditary noble. It is not so elsewhere, except perhaps in some parts of the south. The Piedmontese scoffs at cardinals, ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... my reader, also, that it is possible for the garden to retain some interest even in the winter months. I sometimes question whether it is altogether wise to clear out the old garden stems too completely and too smoothly in the fall, and thereby obliterate every mark of it for the winter months; but however this may be, there are two ways by which the garden year may be extended: by planting things that bloom very late in fall and others that bloom very early in spring; ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... repeated, in a melancholy voice; "they can never, never sleep! repentance cannot obliterate them,—years of penance—fastings, and vigils, and wanderings, cannot wear them from my remembrance! Look at me, my son, and may this decaying frame, which time might yet have spared, teach thee the vanity of human hopes, and lead thee to resist ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... industrialism that for the last twenty years has swelled to obliterate landmarks, to bring all the world to the same level of nickel-plated dullness, the theatre in Madrid has been the refuge of lo castizo. It has been a theatre of manners and local types and customs, of observation and natural history, where a rather specialized well-trained ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... cleverly laid plot, might be discovered, went to a certain spot to remove the traces of the diabolical work which were hidden there. My kinograph shows the footsteps, shows as plainly as if I had been present, the exact person who tried to obliterate the evidence," ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... from my children; derive comfort in educating them, in teaching them that, by their virtues and their devotion to their country, they obliterate the memory of my execution, and recall to national gratitude my services and my claims. Farewell to those I love: you know them! Be their consolation, and through your solicitude for them prolong my life in their hearts! Farewell! for the last time in this ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... Reprobate such indulgence. Ill at ease, Mute, yet her captive, I thrust brown toes through Loose sand no daily large tides overwhelm To cake and roll it firm and smooth and clean As the Atlantic remakes shores, you know. But there, like trailing skirts, long flaws of wind Obliterate the prints feet during calms Track over and over its always lonely stretch, Till some will have, it ghosts must rove at night; For folk by day are rare, yet a still week Leaves hardly ten yards anywhere uncrossed; Tempest spreads all revirginate like snow, Half burying dead wood snapped off from ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... In this place and in the eleventh essay, there are references to the late Archbishop of York which are of no importance to my main argument, and which I have expunged because I desire to obliterate the traces of a temporary misunderstanding with a man of rare ability, candour, and wit, for whom I entertained a great liking and no less respect. I rejoice to think now of the (then) Bishop's cordial hail the first time we met after our little skirmish, "Well, is it to be peace or war?" I replied, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... exclaimed, lifting his hand as he addressed them. "Fear not, but follow so closely in my footprints that your feet obliterate them, and I will bridge the great gulf that lieth between Mo ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... memorials of his reign were everywhere. He was enthroned in the hearts of the French people, as monarch was never enthroned before. But the Bourbons had taken especial care to banish from France every one who bore his name, and to obliterate, as far as possible, every memorial of his wonderful reign. The revolution had burst upon Paris with almost the suddenness of the lightning's flash. There was no one there who could speak in behalf of the descendants of him who had so lately filled the world with ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... Beaton—Angus Beaton; but he was not Scotch, or not more Scotch than Mary Queen of Scots was. His father was a Scotchman, but Beaton was born in Syracuse, New York, and it had taken only three years in Paris to obliterate many traces of native and ancestral manner in him. He wore his black beard cut shorter than his mustache, and a little pointed; he stood with his shoulders well thrown back and with a lateral curve of his person when he talked ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... brought her down to his own low level of vice and suspicion, and turned her deadly sick. She answered none of these letters, and, by dint of resolutely banishing all thought of them and of the writers, she managed in time to obliterate the impression; but she had to live through some ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... around the Temple. In Wat Tyler's rebellion many of the houses were razed by the rioters, books and parchments were carried away and fed to bonfires, and it was the intention of the rebels to destroy the precinct and the lawyers together, for thus, they said, they would obliterate both unjust laws and corrupt law-makers. The "No-Popery" rioters in 1780 marched to attack the Temple, but were awed into flight by the apparently determined front presented by the lawyers and students, who were really in desperate fear themselves. Street-fights with the lawless ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... waked, ate a meager breakfast, and hit the trail up the mountain. We knew the general range of our cougar. It is necessary in all his tracking to get in the field while the dew is on the ground and before the sun dissipates it, also before the goats obliterate the tracks. ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... was about to return to her husband, who would probably come to Florence to meet her—and she added that she hoped I should resume my studies at the university, and in serious preparation for the future obliterate all traces of the past. At these words, which I am inclined to fancy had been got by rote, she sighed and looked down. I promised her entire obedience in every particular, and growing bolder by her timidity, said that, with the doctor's permission, I should wait upon her at her convenience. Aurelia ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... you, or throw light where all is so profoundly buried in darkness. Yet I am not sure. Small things will often lead to greater, and though the past is unhappily beyond recall, since our Maker Himself cannot undo the work of yesterday, or obliterate events embalmed in vanished time, yet there is always the future; and if we could but read the past aright, which we never can, then the future would prove less of a painful riddle than ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... in the open, roaming the prairie alone with the wolf hounds, or with French after the cattle, did much to obliterate the mark which those five days left upon Kalman's body and soul. From the very first the boy had no difficulty in mastering the art of sticking on a broncho's back, partly because he was entirely without fear, but largely because he had an ear and an eye ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... was entered on this side by a stone stile, over which having clambered, you remained still on the wild hill, the within not being so divided from the without as to obliterate the sense of open freedom. A delightful place to be buried in, postulating that delight can accompany a man to his tomb under any circumstances. There was nothing horrible in this churchyard, in the shape of tight mounds bonded with sticks, which shout imprisonment in the ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... vengeance, and had thrown himself entirely in the power of his most inveterate enemies; that the mortal injuries which the one royal family had suffered from the other were now past all forgiveness, and no imaginary union of interests could ever suffice to obliterate them; that, even if the leaders were willing to forget past offences, the animosity of their adherents would prevent a sincere coalition of parties, and would, in spite of all temporary and verbal agreements, preserve an eternal opposition ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... they like about the absurdity of love at first sight; but the young and sensitive always love at first sight, and the love of after-years, however better and more wisely bestowed, is never able to obliterate from the heart the memory of those sudden and vivid impressions made upon it by the ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... proficient as these importations were nowadays to be found in the town. Even flowers and plants and roped vines were brought from afar—not, however, until the stock of the local florists proved insufficient to obliterate the interior structure of the big house, in the Amberson way. It was the last of the great, long remembered dances that "everybody talked about"—there were getting to be so many people in town that no later than the next year there were too ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... him of; and the thought lent new vigour to his limbs next morning. He had another reason to hurry his steps; for each day had waxed a little warmer; and to-day the snow melted fast, threatening at last to obliterate ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... exist &c. 1; pass away, perish; be extinct, become extinct &c. adj.; die out; disappear &c. 449; melt away, dissolve, leave not a rack behind; go, be no more; die &c. 360. annihilate, render null, nullify; abrogate &c. 756; destroy &c. 162; take away; remove &c. (displace) 185; obliterate, extirpate. Adj. inexistent[obs3], nonexistent &c. 1; negative, blank; missing, omitted; absent &c. 187,; insubstantial, shadowy, spectral, visionary. unreal, potential, virtual; baseless, in nubibus[Lat]; unsubstantial &c. 4; vain. unborn, uncreated[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... violence of their exertions. Hence the analogy between the insanities of the mind, and the convulsions of the muscles described in the preceding genus, is curiously exact. The convulsions without stupor, are either just sufficient to obliterate the pain, which occasions them; or are succeeded by greater pain, as in the convulsio dolorifica. So the exertions in the mania mutabilis are either just sufficient to allay the pain which occasions them, and the patient dwells comparatively in a quiet state; or those ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... life is by far the most important. No subsequent training can entirely obliterate the results of early impressions. They may be greatly modified; the character may be changed; but some, and indeed many, of the impressions of youth will ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... need no longer fear to face my father, and I believe her, for a woman can see more deeply than a man. So now I shall return home, to be a comfort, as I devoutly hope, to my dear father's declining years; and perhaps, with the aid of my wealth, I may be able to do enough good to obliterate the memory of all the grief and shame that I have caused him to suffer. That is my story, Troubridge; and all that I will add to it is this: If ever you feel tempted to stray, though ever so slightly, from the path of rectitude, think of the ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... but first Dick, you run back to the camp and empty your canteen on the fire, and obliterate all traces of it. Then fill your canteen and rejoin us here, and we'll be off for the boundary monument," ordered Garry, thus proving himself to be a real woodsman and Ranger, never forgetting that a stray spark or ember may smoulder for some little time and perhaps start ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... the unskilled hands of surviving friends and relatives. On some there were merely the initials of a name; some were inscribed with misspelt prose or rhyme, in deep letters, which the moss and wintry rain of many years had not been able to obliterate. These, these were graves where loved ones slept! It is an old theme of satire, the falsehood and vanity of monumental eulogies; but when affection and sorrow grave the letters with their own painful ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... one of these Lancashire weavers dying with hunger there is more thought and heart, a greater arithmetical amount of misery and desperation, than in whole gangs of Quashees.' He maintained, too, that a strain of sentiment about criminals was very prevalent in his day, which tended seriously to obliterate or diminish the real difference between right and wrong. He hated with an intense hatred that whole system of philosophy which denied that there was a deep, essential, fundamental difference between right and wrong, and turned ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... syllable. Spenser is very free in shifting the pause about; and though the later poets who have used this stanza are not so free, yet, with the exception of Shenstone and of Byron, they do not scruple to obliterate all pause between the sixth and seventh syllables. Thus Thomson (Castle of Indolenee, i. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... is to be thankful that their lack of improvement can still entertain me. One can never be thankful enough for really grotesque people. But I confess I don't enjoy seeing people spiteful and mean and vicious. I want to obliterate all that." ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... attraction between men and women has too often prevented a perception of the profound differences which make the members of each sex in many things strange to the other, and capable of sympathy only with their own. It is in giving full play to the differences of sex rather than in seeking to obliterate them, as was apparently the effort of some reformers in your day, that the enjoyment of each by itself and the piquancy which each has for the other, are alike enhanced. In your day there was no career ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... that case somebody else will obliterate the existing number, and I shall be summoned to appear before a ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... known the builder of one of these to leave his tracks inside, trusting the explosion to obliterate them. But sometimes the machine does ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... three days, of course," Sir Timothy said drily, "I shall do my best to obliterate all traces of my various crimes. Still, you are a clever detective, and you can give Mr. Ledsam a few hints. Take my advice. You won't get that search warrant, and if you apply for it none of you will ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... if himself, and not his father, had been the first comer of his line from the north. He had married an English Christian, and, having none of the Scotch accent, was ungracious enough to be ashamed of his blood. He was desirous to obliterate alike the Hebrew and Caledonian vestiges in his name, and signed himself E. M. Crotchet, which by degrees induced the majority of his neighbours to think that his name was Edward Matthew. The more effectually to sink the Mac, he christened his villa "Crotchet Castle," and determined to hand ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... Anxious to obliterate the memory of that emotion, he could think of nothing better than china; and moving with her slowly from cabinet to cabinet, he kept taking up bits of Dresden and Lowestoft and Chelsea, turning them round and round with his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... merciful silence obliterate the scars of war, and succeeding generations, fostered by the smiles of national prosperity, soften the bitterness of the past and mellow the memory of a mighty struggle in which each contending host called upon Almighty God to sustain the cause ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... above it all arose the hope that filled his mind. "Ah!" he said to me, "when I saw those places, how I thought that to leave one's hand upon the time, lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for the mass of toiling people that nothing could obliterate, would be to lift oneself above the dust of all the Doges in their graves, and stand upon a giant's staircase that Sampson couldn't overthrow!" In varying forms this ambition was ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of making a mound, or scratching a hole to receive them, it burrows into the sand to the depth of about three feet obliquely downwards, and deposits its eggs at the bottom. It then loosely covers up the mouth of the hole, and is said by the natives to obliterate and disguise its own footmarks leading to and from the hole, by making many other tracks and scratches in the neighbourhood. It lays its eggs only at night, and at Bouru a bird was caught early one morning as it was ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... over the lifeless face, and scanned the beautiful features which, living, had wrought such magic on all that looked upon them. They were, indeed, much wasted; but it was impossible for the fingers of death or of decay altogether to obliterate the traces of that exquisite beauty which had so distinguished her. As I gazed on this most sad and striking spectacle, remembrances thronged fast upon my mind, and tear after tear fell upon the cold form that slept ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... this was impertinence, and no doubt I looked annoyed, and Mr. Vandermarck hastened to obliterate the impression by a very rapid movement upon the scenery, the beauties of the river, ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... dog by the legs, he drew it to the edge, and hurled it after its companion. Then, searching about in the crevices of the rocks for moss and lichens, he strewed them over the ground where the dog had fallen, so as to obliterate the traces of blood. He was some time thus occupied before he had performed the operation to his satisfaction; and then he once more crossed the chasm, with as much unconcern as if he had been passing along an ordinary road. I ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... plain. It is now too late to restore elsewhere the great natural possession which the thoughtless savagery of a former generation destroyed in careless ruth, but, thanks to this early impulse of conservation, a fine example still remains in the Yellowstone. But it is not too late to obliterate wholly certain misconceptions by which that savagery was then justified. It is not too late to look upon wild animals as fellow heritors of the earth, possessing certain natural rights which men are ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... the criticism. During the brief conversation between Nehal Singh and Nicholson he had had ample opportunity to study the two men and to glean the esthetic pleasure which all beauty gave him. Both represented the best type of their respective races, and, curiously enough, this perfection seemed to obliterate the differences. Travers could not help thinking, as he glanced from one to the other, that, had it not been for the dress, it would have been difficult to decide who was the native prince and who ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... amongst the characteristics of the present race, swarth-iness and leanness. These we suspect to have been also characteristics of the old original ton d'apameibomenoi Greeks. If so, the fact would seem to argue, that the changes, after all, had not been on a scale sufficient to obliterate the primitive type of Hellenic nature; whilst the existence of any diffused type marks a tendency to national unity, and shows that some one element has so much predominated as to fuse the rest ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... "obliterate" in its literal meaning. Ans. To erase.—If we should speak of obliterating the memory of a wrong, would the word be used in its primary or ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... relieved. "Well, you'll have to go and bring it out, or kill it and obliterate the body. You know why, as well ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... Westminster Hall, upon this windy November morning, nobody thought of Clarendon. The business of the day was interesting enough to obliterate all considerations of yesterday. The young barristers, who were learning their trade by listening to their betters, had been shivering on their benches in the Common Pleas since nine o'clock, in that chilly corner where every blast from the north or north-east swept over the ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... "but it is simply impossible. The Judge-Advocate-General is a very high official; I cannot allow him to go to the English headquarters and give information as to what is going on here. The authorities would justly put a very bad construction upon such ill-timed amiability, and I should not like to obliterate the good impression which the success of the expedition to Simla has made upon my superiors by an unpardonable act of ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... of having been rounded by attrition or solution, I conclude that they have gained their form as well as their dark colour from the flesh of the shell-fish from which they had their origin; but which have been so compleatly fused by heat, or heat and water, as to obliterate all vestiges of the shell, in the same manner as the nodules of agate and onyx were produced from parts of vegetables, but which had been so completely fused as to obliterate all marks of their organization, or as many iron-nodules ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... associated together, and grouped into one scene or picture on the memory. These objects may have been numerous; but by the operation of this principle, they have all been apprehended, and united so powerfully with each other, that no future effort of the child can either separate or obliterate any portion of them; and so comprehensive, that the recollection of any one of the circumstances ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... men had continued their work until now there was no vestige of war in the grounds that labor could obliterate; and masons had come to repair the walls of the house itself and plasterers ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... famous Danes, he chose a unique burial-place. Away at Grenen, in the sand-dunes, overlooking the fighting waters of the Skagerack and Cattegat, stands his cromlech-shaped tomb, near the roar of the sea he loved so much, where time and sand will soon obliterate all that remains of the ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... silence, without exposing themselves to the danger of being bewildered in its labyrinths. A servile and bigoted education was the source of this dread; this had impressed frightful images upon his tender brain, which, during the remainder of his life, he was never able wholly to obliterate. Religious melancholy was an hereditary disorder in his family. The education which he and his brothers had received was calculated to produce it; and the men to whose care they were entrusted, selected with this object, were also ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... should have them unless over his own dead body. They argued jestingly, while I blushed—a hot, overwhelming blush, and seeing it, they paused, looking mystified and distressed, and abruptly changed the conversation. Did they think me ridiculous and a prude, or did that blush for the moment obliterate the sham signs of age, and show them for the moment the face of a girl? I should like to know, but probably ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... colouring of a peach is lovelier than the poor little pale blossom that preceded it—however attractive a middle-aged woman may be there must be some traces to show that she has lived half her life; and to suppose that pain brule brocade, and hand-worked embroidery, can obliterate those, is extreme folly. Dress in rich and dark velvets, and old point-lace that has been twenty years in your possession, and you will be as beautiful and as interesting as a portrait by one of the old Venetian masters. Can Theodore's ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... departure is not the notion of Being or of Unity, but the human soul seeking reconcilation with God. We need not be on our guard against pantheism in reading the Spanish mystics; they show no tendency to obliterate the dividing lines of personality, or to deify sinful humanity. The cause of this peculiarity is to be sought partly in the strong individualism of the Spanish character, and partly in external circumstances.[285] Free thought in Spain was so sternly ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... have been drilled to write by certain fixed and unchangeable rules of rhetoric and grammar will produce similar compositions. They have no literary style, for style is individuality and character—the style is the man, and grammar tends to obliterate individuality. No study is so irksome to everybody, except the sciolists who teach it, as grammar. It remains forever a bad taste in the mouth of the man of ideas, and has weaned bright minds innumerable from a desire to express themselves through ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... of the relation made it an amazing thing to hear, even more amazing than it would have been made by a more imaginative handling. Her obvious inability to cope with the unusual and villainous, combined with her entire willingness to obliterate herself in any manner in her whole-souled tenderness for the one present object of her existence, were things a man could not be unmoved by, even though experience led him to smile at the lack of knowledge of the world which had ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... out for 'nine days' wonders,' and speedily allow one wonder to obliterate the remembrance of that which preceded it. So it is with all newspaper topics, and so it has been in respect to the preserved-meat question. We all know how great was the excitement at the commencement of the present year on this matter. Ships' accounts overhauled; arctic stores ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... more than half ashamed, though scarce willing to reappear when she had made Peregrine wash his face and hands, smooth the hair ruffled in his nap, freshly tying his little cravat and the ribbons on his shoes and at his knees. To make his hair into anything but elf locks, or to obliterate the bristly tuft that made him like Riquet, was impossible, illness had made him additionally lean and sallow, and his keen eyes, under their black contracted brows and dark lashes, showed all the more the curious variation in their tints, and ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... consciences tell us that, if we really loved people as Jesus does, if we understood them as sympathetically and cared as much for them, the cross would be far more intelligible to us? But if, in plain fact, we do not see why we should bear the cross for others, why we should deny and obliterate self on this scale for the salvation of men—how, I ask, to people of such a mind should Jesus be intelligible? It is not to be expected. In no other sphere would one dream of it. When a man avows that he ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... if he got away from Honora, Adelia Louise would have him 'down on the mat.'" From which Mr. Palford argued that the impression made by the little Miss Hutchinson with the Manchester accent had not yet had time to obliterate itself. ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... changes in Sects and Tongues, and the happening of Floods and Pestilences, obliterate ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... most divine of men, have been forced to side with those who are openly Atheists or Agnostics. The clue to their theories was unguardedly exposed by Weizsaecker, who said, with regard to St. John's Gospel, "It is impossible to imagine any power of faith and philosophy so great as thus to obliterate the recollection of the real life, and to substitute for it this marvellous picture of a Divine Being." [1] This remark shows us that the critic approached the Gospel with a prejudice against the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, and rejected the Gospel mainly because ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... probability, at about seventeen thousand years from our time. This epoch would doubtless carry us back many thousand years beyond that of the alphabet; the invention of which was sufficient of itself to obliterate the details of previous history, as the event ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... no prospect of work. Everything she had except the clothes on her back had been pawned to buy food and lodgings. But she was young and resilient. When she got back home to the country where she belonged, time would obliterate from her mind the experiences of which she ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... to degrade man, to destroy that sense of his dignity which is the principal security of human life, to obliterate a belief in the divine origin and sanction of morality, and in the existence of a future life of rewards and punishments, and so to promote the disorganization of society, and the degradation of men to the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the cooking process is completed. Fruit should be cooked by stewing, or by gentle simmering; hard boiling will destroy the fine flavor of all fruits, and especially of berries and other small fruits. Cinnamon, cloves, or other spices, should not be added, as their stronger flavors deaden or obliterate the natural flavor, which should always be preserved as perfectly as possible. If desirable to add some foreign flavor, let it be the flavor of another fruit, or the perfume of flowers. For Instance, flavor apple with lemon, pineapple, ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... though he can hardly be classed among the progressives or revolutionary propagandists of the age. In person he was tall, graceful, and commanding. As the son of an important chief, he had been free from those menial toils which, in that climate, soon obliterate all intellectual characteristics. His face was well formed for an African's. His high and broad brow arched over a straight nose, while his lips had nothing of that vulgar grossness which gives so sensual an expression to his countrymen. ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... of letter-writing, were we in like ignorance. We forget to justly appreciate a blessing while we have it in constant use; but let us be for a short time deprived of it, and then we lament its loss and realize its worth. Deprive mankind of pen, ink and paper, obliterate from the human mind all knowledge of letter-writing,—then estimate, if you can, thee loss ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... anything in the way of an actual revival must always be impossible. Such vain antiquarianism in a waste of the poet's power. The composite experience of all the ages is part of each one of us: to deduct from that experience, to obliterate any part of it, to come face to face with the people of a past age, as if the Middle Age, the Renaissance, the eighteenth century had not been, is as impossible as to become a little [224] child, or enter again into the womb and be born. But though it is not possible ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... have wished his friend also to adopt. He was unable to comprehend Herrera's deeply-rooted and unselfish love, which had grown up with him from boyhood, had borne up against so many crosses and discouragements, and which time, although it might prove its hopelessness, could never entirely obliterate. ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... obliterate old distinctions. The family, neighborhood, kindred, have their claims even under the most firmly organized of states; but those claims are limited and controlled. Even so, the broader social will may come to regard states as answerable for their decisions. International law remains to ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... Olifant's River and at the cobalt mine near there joined those who had remained behind under General Muller. The enemy, however, who seemed determined, if possible, to obliterate us from the earth's surface, discovered our whereabouts about the middle of July, and attacked us in overwhelming numbers. We had taken up a position on the "Randts," and offered as much resistance as we could. The enemy poured into us a heavy shell fire from their howitzers ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... statistics of the illiterates in the United States and said: "An educational qualification, wisely considered, would within a few years entirely obliterate the whole mass of this species of undesirable voters. The right of suffrage can not and should not be taken from those who at present legally enjoy it. All women of legal age with the proposed educational requirements should be ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... most elegant aplomb]. Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh! Mr Mangan, you are bound in honor to obliterate from your mind all you heard while you were pretending to be asleep. It was not meant for you ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... vest being fringed with the fur of the mink; wearing a jaunty Spanish sombrero; boots on the dainty feet of patent leather, with tops reaching to the knees; a face slightly sun-burned, yet showing the traces of beauty that even excessive dissipation could not obliterate; eyes black and piercing; mouth firm, resolute, and devoid of sensual expression: hair of raven color and of remarkable length;—such was the picture of the youth as beheld by Redburn ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... last journey back to that which we had taken in the autumn. 'It is worth while,' he said, 'to have seen Aosta. I am glad to have done it. It is not often at my age that one can get so much pleasure out of a new thing.' I think he had a double motive in mentioning Aosta. He put it forward partly to obliterate for me the sadness of the past three weeks by raising the memory of the pleasant times that ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... quartette broke into a gentle run. Soon they were on the highway and not more than a block from the campus wall. As they neared the east gate a terrific reverberating peal of thunder rent the air. So completely did it obliterate all other sound that none of the four heard the purr of a motor behind ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... strangled, by order of his brutal father, in the sight of his wife and little ones, who were then burned alive in the house where they had taken refuge. The Champ Dolent does not belie its name, and even thirteen centuries and a half have failed to obliterate the memory of a savage and unnatural crime, which, its remoteness notwithstanding, fills the soul with loathing against its perpetrators and with deep pity for the ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... of view taken by the author leads towards the conclusion that the safety of the future lies in a progressive movement of social control alleviating at least the misery it cannot obliterate, and based upon the broad general principle of equality of opportunity, and a fair start. The chief immediate opportunities for social betterment, as the writer sees them, lie in the attempt to give every human being in childhood, ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... your father yet," replied Giovanni, hesitatingly. "He might listen to me, it is true; but he would treat our love as a mere childish fancy that time could not fail to dim, if not obliterate. I am deeply in earnest, Zuleika, and could not bear to be treated as a thoughtless, headlong stripling, who did not know his own mind. Ridicule, even in its mildest form, would fire my blood, fill me with mad projects of revenge. ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... to herself, about the possibility of such a treasure having been hidden by the King when he, Akhnaton, knew that he was dying and when he realized that his new capital of Tel-el-Amarna would not long survive his decease, that the priests of the old religion would do all in their power to obliterate his memory and teachings. She knew that Michael was not the only person who held this view. He was not the ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... you say is just, and I doubt not that these plains and hills will one day resound with the activities of civilised life: the plough will obliterate the deer-tracks, the axe will lay low the forests, and the lowing of cattle and the bark of dogs will replace the trumpeting of the wild-goose and the cry of plover; but when the change begins to come, I will strike my tent and go to the great unknown lands ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... leveller, is not permitted to obliterate, among Christians, the distinction of caste, or to rescue the lifeless form of the colored man from the insults of his white brethren. In the porch of a Presbyterian Church, in Philadelphia, in 1837, was suspended a card, containing the form of a deed, to be ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... connected with the most intimate transactions of a lifetime which was no more than a short and stormy passage from youth to manhood; for he was cut off before the age at which men abandon the wild ways of their springtide, and are usually disposed to obliterate the record of them. At least one recent biography might be mentioned which would have read differently if it had been ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Ireland, and Iceland, and through them an iniquitous slave trade was developed. The law of nations did not place its ban upon this slave traffic until by statute England and the United States attempted to obliterate this ineradicable blot upon our civilization, and only a half century ago Austria, Prussia, and Russia declared it to ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... we had entered the Imperial domain all was most scrupulously well kept. Not a gravel stone was out of place. Gangs of men were, indeed, kept to rake over instantly the gravel drives so as to obliterate the track of the ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... the pious sisterhood who have gone before her; dying where she has lived, surrounded by her companions, her last hours soothed by their prayers and tears, sure of their vigils for the repose of her soul, and above all, sure that neither pleasure nor vanity will ever obliterate her remembrance ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... being particularly fine. The ruined church possesses the grace and lightness of architecture peculiar to the twelfth century, and is, even in its decay, of truly sublime and grand proportions. Time has been unable to obliterate the skilful work of our forefathers, for the Early English transition arches, the delicate molding, and the exquisite stone tracery in the windows still delight the eye. The history of Tintern is almost ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... remembrance of the insults became more unendurable. Abuse from the old to the young, and from a sick man to a sound one, cannot fail to rankle, since it cannot be flung back. Generosity may impose silence, but it cannot obliterate an insult or heal ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the slaves recommends itself to all persons who fully understand the position, and if it be honestly carried out will soon obliterate the crime of enforced labor upon the island. A sudden freeing of the blacks, that is, all at once, would have been attended with much risk to all parties, although justice and humanity demand their liberation. France tried the experiment in St. ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... the faint sickly perfume I knew and abhorred. I turned them over and over; the edges of the note-paper were stained with blood—Guido's blood—as though in its last sluggish flowing it had endeavored to obliterate all traces of the daintily penned lines that now awaited my perusal. Slowly I untied the ribbon. With methodical deliberation I read one letter after the other. They were all from Nina—all written to Guido while he was in Rome, some of them bearing ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... knew there was no hope. The fast-falling snow obliterated all tracks almost instantly. Even though the others missed him, they could never find him, and,—this thought struck a new chill through his veins,—in a short time the snowfall would even obliterate him! ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... "But it is in danger, and though we are convinced of his innocence, the world will not believe it. It will forget all his noble deeds, all his high-mindedness and liberality, it will obliterate all his past, and only remember that this day, for the first time in his life, he has it not in his power to fulfil his word. It will condemn him as if he were a common cheat, and brand him with the disgraceful ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... What does it all mean? Whenever thoughts like these crowd my brain I feel as if I were on the brink of madness; such a rage seizes me that if I could I would throw down, trample, and spit upon the forces of life, reduce the whole world to chaos and obliterate its existence. On my journey back from Vienna I was searching for some unearthly abode where I might love Aniela even as Dante loved Beatrice. I built it of the sufferings from which as from fire my love had risen purified, of my renunciations ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... them; their ponderous volumes are too formidable to analyze; it is so much easier to declaim than to examine such sturdy antagonists; but we owe to the schoolmen far more than we are apt to suppose, and if it were possible to scratch their names from the page of history, and to obliterate all traces of their bulky writings from our libraries and from our literature, we should find our knowledge dark and gloomy in comparison ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... left Tomsk in the evening, the snow was falling rapidly, and threatened to obliterate the track along the frozen surface of the river. There were no post horses at the station, and we were obliged to charter private teams at double the usual rates. The governor warned us that we might have trouble in securing ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... streets, the earnestness with which he inculcated watchful heed to the armed slaves of the household, and the positive manner in which he insisted on leaving Thrasea and a dozen of his own trustiest men to assist Hortensia's people, did more to obliterate the hopes his own words would otherwise have excited, than the words ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... of such men to steer a course through the wood, let him remember that three months' growth in an African forest will obliterate the track left by the passage of an army. If any hold that men are not created so dense and unambitious as has just been represented, let him look nearer home in our own merchant service. The able-bodied seaman goes ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... vivid still in his own mind that it reached ours by a process of telepathy which he could not control or prevent. All through his true-false words this picture stood forth in fearful detail against the shadows behind him. He could not veil, much less obliterate, it. We knew; and, I always thought, ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... act of worship, perpetrating a crime of high treason against the God of heaven, while they themselves believed they were performing an act of merit,—excited ideas and feelings in my mind which time can never obliterate." ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... saw the cruelty in him again. It was impossible for her, listening with every sense taut to the uttermost, to obliterate the personal element, to think that he was merely a machine grinding, in the course of his duty, as the implacable mills crush the yielding grain into the listless powder ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... me tell you, but I don't want to allow my professional zeal to obliterate my sense of the ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... mustered up heart, he might have surprised in her eyes a light to lift him out from this slough of humiliation, to obliterate chagrin in a flood ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... Beacon-fires, with their lurid midnight glare, were to flash the tidings from mountain to mountain. The peal of alarm was to ring along from steeple to steeple, from city to hamlet, from valley to hill-side, till the whole Catholic population should be aroused to obliterate every vestige of ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... external ritual of religion—the worshipping multitudes, the priests, and the paraphernalia of sacrifice. But now, on the same spot, he was to see a sight in whose glory all these things would disappear. This is what the critical moments of religious experience are always meant to do: they obliterate the familiar externals of religion and reveal the reality which is hidden behind them; they convert common spots of every-day experience into the house of God and ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... past few weeks—possibly I have; but you are the man who has been carrying out the plans, and you are the man the courts will recognize. But we're wasting time sitting here jawing at each other like a pair of old women. It's up to us to obliterate Lidgerwood; after which it will be up to you to get his job and cover up your tracks as you can. If he lives, he'll dig; and if he digs, he'll turn up things that neither of us can stand for. See ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... exciting, was at last repaid for the disappointment of her evening at the opera. It was characteristic of her that she remembered her failures as keenly as her triumphs, and that the passionate desire to obliterate, to "get even" with them, was always among the latent incentives of her conduct. Now at last she was having what she wanted—she was in conscious possession of the "real thing"; and through her other, diffused, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... speech, it could be done by this method, and conversely memories could be effaced, habits removed, and desires eradicated—a sort of psychic surgery was, in fact, in general use. Indignities, humbling experiences, were thus forgotten, amorous widows would obliterate their previous husbands, angry lovers release themselves from their slavery. To graft desires, however, was still impossible, and the facts of thought transference were yet unsystematised. The psychologists illustrated their expositions with some astounding ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... subterfuges, which neutralising the ordinary criteria of full or defective evidence in historical documents, would, taken as a general rule, render all collation and cross-examination of written records ineffective, and obliterate the main character by which authentic histories are distinguished from those traditional tales, which each successive reporter enlarges and fashions to his own fancy and purpose, and every different edition of which more or less contradicts the other? Allow me ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... nothing to create beauty, but everything to produce ugliness. A Hottentot profile cannot be changed into a Roman outline, but out of a Grecian nose you may make a Calmuck's. It only requires to obliterate the root of the nose and to flatten the nostrils. The dog Latin of the Middle Ages had a reason for its creation of the verb denasare. Had Gwynplaine when a child been so worthy of attention that his face had been subjected to transmutation? Why ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... might be exercised very effectively in retouching composites. It would be easy to obliterate the ghosts of stray features that are always present when the composite is made from only a few portraits, and it would not be difficult to tone down any irregularity in the features themselves, due to some obtrusive ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... indifferently to both river systems, the level being so complete at one point between them as to obliterate the line of water-shed.—Herschel.] ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... by the open window within sound of the gentle, healing rain. Sommers noticed that Alves had changed her dress from the black gown she had worn in the afternoon to a colored summer dress. The room had been rearranged, and all signs of the afternoon scene removed. It was as if she willed to obliterate the past at once. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... vestige of day had passed, the coast of Australia had faded from our sight, though not from our memory; for, however much thoughts of the land to which we were returning crowded on our minds, they could not as yet entirely obliterate the recollection of that we were quitting. The Swan River colony—its history, its state, its prospects—naturally occupied much of our mind. What a change had come over it even since our visit! From a ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... shall we do with ourselves? I'm sure I wish I didn't know 'twas Christmas day at all. It makes a fellow feel queer and nonsensical—homesick, I suppose they call it—and all that sort of thing. I vote we obliterate the fact, by chopping as hard as any ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... me. I see a hand she cannot see—forms, faces, happenings not registered on the camera; places where linger the invisible spirits of joyful or painful experiences; playmates, companions, whole families now dust, a thousand events recalled only when time begins to obliterate those of the ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... question be well founded, although its admission would inscribe on our history a page which we might desire most of all to obliterate, and although, if true, it must painfully disturb our confidence in the justice and the high sense of moral and political responsibility of those whose memories we have been taught to cherish with so much reverence and respect, still we have only one course of action ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... what she had heard the "dresser" say, and she remembered the sin. But apart from the deception she practised upon both men, there was the wrong-doing. Her conscience did not assail her now; but she knew that she would suffer to-morrow or next day. That sense of sin which she could not obliterate from her nature would rise to her lips like a salt wave, and poison her life with its bitterness, and she asked herself vain questions: Why had she left her father? Why had she two lovers? Why did she rise to seek things that made her unhappy? She thought of yesterday's journey to ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... have supposed such a thing. If I were he, I think I should fly to the antipodes. I should change my name, sear my features with vitriol, and learn another language. I should obliterate my past self altogether; but men are so different, so audacious—some men, at least—and Stanley, ever since his ill-omened arrival at Redman's Farm, last autumn, has amazed ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu |
