"Obliterating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the air that kisses The splendid and ignoble with one breath, Gentle as obliterating Death— Though you be gentler yet, In days when the old, old things begin to fret The backward-looking consciousness, Will you forget? Or if ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... Whether sixty-five members for a few years, and a hundred or two hundred for a few more, be a safe depositary for a limited and well-guarded power of legislating for the United States? I must own that I could not give a negative answer to this question, without first obliterating every impression which I have received with regard to the present genius of the people of America, the spirit which actuates the State legislatures, and the principles which are incorporated with ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... in mind, obliterating all other thoughts at their hour of retiring, for the first evening since their fright ten days before, neither Polly nor Betty remembered the locking of their outside door upon ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... other—no matter how different under the skin—homogeneity mobilizes the individual man. It removes the social taboo, permits the individual to move into strange groups, and thus facilitates new and adventurous contacts. In obliterating the external signs, which in secondary groups seem to be the sole basis of caste and class distinctions, it realizes, for the individual, the principle of laissez faire, laissez aller. Its ultimate economic effect is to substitute personal for racial competition, and to give free play ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... object he had in view. He avowedly married, in the first instance, for money, although at a later stage his wife was able to afford herself the consolation, and to pay him the graceful compliment of obliterating the sordid reproach by declaring that "if he had the chance again he would marry her for love"—a statement confirmed by his passionate, albeit somewhat histrionic love-letters. The desire of fame, which may easily degenerate into a mere craving for notoriety, was unquestionably the spur which in ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... before have so felt the superiority of this man, whose pure love—almost worship—she had put aside as a thing of light importance; and I think the interview helped him in the work upon which he had entered, that of obliterating from his heart all traces ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... under and over reaching, its unfaithfulness; and then again of this—child, thrust all at once a thousand miles into it, with never—so far as he could see—an implement, a weapon, a sense of danger, or a refuge; well pleased with herself, as it seemed, lifted up into the bliss of self-obliterating wifehood, and resting in her husband with such an assurance of safety and happiness as a saint might pray for grace to show to Heaven itself. He stood silent, feeling too grim to speak, and presently Mrs. Richling looked up with a sudden liveliness ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... Each railroad was eager to get the largest share of the traffic of transporting oil. Rockefeller, ruminating in his small refinery at Cleveland, Ohio, had conceived the revolutionary idea of getting a monopoly of the production and distribution of oil, obliterating the middleman, and systematizing and centralizing ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... of freedom, would shelter their happiness and their joy; and they looked out towards the North, where lay, still hidden in the arms of the distant horizon, the white cliffs of Albion, whilst the mist even now was wrapping it its obliterating embrace the shores of the land where they had both suffered, where they had both learned ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... to have looked with complacency on this period, and they certainly made it an era from which to date their later history. Perhaps, however, they had not much choice in this matter. Nabonassar was a man of energy and determination. Bent probably on obliterating the memory of the preceding period of subjugation, he "destroyed the acts of the kings who had preceded him;" and the result was that the war of his accession became almost necessarily the era from which subsequent events had ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... midst of one of his most prolific grain fields, as a grim return to that nature he was impoverishing, with neither mark nor monument to indicate the spot; and that even the temporary mound above him should, at the fitting season of the year, be leveled with the rest of the field by the obliterating plowshares. A grave was accordingly dug about a quarter of a mile from his office amidst a "volunteer" crop so dense that the large space mown around the narrow opening, to admit of the presence of the multitude, seemed ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... was sovereign more gracious to those who came in contact with him, or less ceremonious with his friends; whilst abroad he had lived with his little band of courtiers more as a companion than a king. The bond of exile had drawn them close together; an equal fortune had gone far towards obliterating distinctions of royalty; and custom had so fitted the monarch and his friends to familiarity, that on his return to England neither he nor they laid aside a mutual freedom of treatment which by degrees extended itself throughout the court. For all that, "he was master," as ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... strip of sand was the sole link between Etchiu on the one hand and Echigo on the other. The natives call the place Oya shiradzu, ko shiradzu, that is, a spot where the father no longer knows the child, nor the child the father; so obliterating to sense of all beside is the personal danger. Refuge there is none of any kind. To have been caught here in a storm on the making tide, must indeed have been to look ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... great vandal, too, obliterating even that interest in the classic past which is born of respect for tradition. War slays all yesterdays, so that human interest lives only in the fierce and present moment, or blazes anew at thought ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... of any irrelevant digression. In the first three books of Paradise Regained there is not a single simile. Nor yet can it be said that the version of the gospel narrative has the fault of most paraphrases, viz., that of weakening the effect, and obliterating the chiselled features of the original. Let a reader take Paradise Regained not as a theme used as a canvas for poetical embroidery, an opportunity for an author to show off his powers of writing, but as a bona fide attempt ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... elsewhere it was quite soft, and we could hear the gurgling of water underneath, and sometimes it sounded a little more sepulchral than we liked. Looking far up the acclivity, we saw still larger snow-fields obliterating the trail. "We can never cross those snow-fields," one of us declared, a good deal of doubt in his tones. A moment's reflection followed, and then the other exclaimed stoutly, "Let us climb straight up, then!" To which his companion replied, ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... a long time ago with me, and I never was a girl. Besides, the frank and direct behavior of Kenby and Mrs. Adding has been very obliterating to my ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... men was sent forward to reconnoitre the position of the village, and to decide upon the best points of attack. The rest of the company retired to some little distance from the trail, where they concealed themselves, obliterating, as far as possible, their tracks. It was deemed necessary to proceed with the utmost caution. The Blackfeet composed one of the most numerous and ferocious of all the Indian tribes. Their warriors were numbered by thousands. It ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... "to destroy the house in obliterating all traces of our former means of egress. It has been commanded that you two be returned safely, and we are authorized to trust implicitly in your future silence regarding the existence of Theros. This is ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... the bottom, owing to their altitude; this was undoubtedly the explanation of the strange appearance of the continents of North and South America. On account of the enormous distance I was away from Earth, the shallow waters appeared as land, obliterating completely the familiar coast line, and only the extreme depth of an ocean showed ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... the gleaming serpent still at play—still writhing along, still obliterating the few score scattered fugitives that some way, somehow, had ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... Body.—The difficulties of removal usually increase from the time of aspiration of the object. It tends to work downward and outward, while the mucosa becomes edematous, partly closing over the foreign body, and even completely obliterating the lumen of smaller bronchi. Later, granulation tissue and the formation of stricture further hide the object. The patient's health deteriorates with the onset of pulmonary pathology, and renders him a less favorable subject for bronchoscopy. Organic foreign bodies, which produce early and intense ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... slaves, intermarriage, and trade between the groups have been powerful influences in obliterating tribal lines, thus adding further confusion to the ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... national policy, as if the ship of state were periodically captured by privateers, has hastened our downward progress in the evil way. By making the administration prominent at the cost of the government, and by its constant lesson of scramble and vicissitude, almost obliterating the idea of orderly permanence, it has tended in no small measure to make disruption possible, for Mr. Lincoln's election threw the weight of every office-holder in the South into the scale of Secession. The ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... glanced at her, arrested the glance and, for a second, held it on her, but with an unconcern so obliterating that it had the effect of blotting-paper. Mrs. Austen felt herself disappearing. It was as though Cassy had looked at her ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... light began to shine. I no longer felt the nervous anxieties that had kept me awake through the earlier part of the night. I was calmed by one great dread,—the thought of the Spanish Woman! Her presence rose up and possessed my imaginary court room, obliterating the figures of the judge and the lawyers, until it seemed that she and I and the prisoner were the only persons in the room, and that the one person she was fighting in all the ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... fear gripped Garth's heart, instantly obliterating all thought of Mabyn. He dashed after Rina, nerved to a desperate fleetness. She knew the ground better than he; and hampered, moreover, by the weight of his gun, he despaired of overtaking the moccasined savage. But at the watercourse the strange ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... these huge animals abound in the woods, and from their gregarious habits usually traversing the country in large troops together, prove highly destructive to the plantations of the inhabitants, obliterating the traces of cultivation by merely walking through the grounds; but they are also fond of the produce of their gardens, particularly of plantain-trees and the sugar-cane, which they devour with eagerness. This indulgence of appetite ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... while he was oscillating in a half-rational condition between Andover and Boston, with an occasional visit to Plymouth, he fell into a fit of pessimism and despair during which he spent two days in obliterating the materials for his biography, by destroying all his letters and manuscripts. He did as much as he could to make impossible any adequate account of his career or any suitable revelation of his character as developed in his correspondence. ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... different from each other, and yet they might have painted the same pictures as born Frenchmen, and it would not have excited any great surprise as a marked divergence from French art. The cosmopolitan spirit, whether for good or for evil, is hastily obliterating all distinctions. What is distinctly national in these countries is less valuable than the immense wealth of universal ideas; and the writers who use this wealth appeal to no narrow circle: the foremost writers, the Tolstois and ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... one's energies were taken up by the task of mastering the way between or over the rugged blocks which filled the bottom of the place. But at last, at a sudden turn, a gleam of the white ice was seen, and soon after Dale was busily obliterating the mark he had made ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... his steps insensibly, for the thought of Caesar waiting was like a spur even to physical effort, and even so his mind outraced his feet, till it came full tilt against a girl coming directly from its goal and momentarily obliterating it by ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... the thing which stood between her and realisation—sometimes it almost was, at least she persuaded herself so. At others there were things harder to control; brief moments when crushing down all opposition and obliterating other thoughts, came the memory of how she had crouched behind the chopping-block, how hidden her tears in his coat. There was no reason or common-sense in that, no friendship or good-fellowship in the clasp of his arms; it was the natural man ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... into a glowing account of the affair, obliterating himself entirely and making it seem that Miss Gray was the only person present, so that Bauer had to give Helen the full account as near as he could of Clifford's part ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... yellow land to likeness of a sea: The bountiful fair land of vine and grain, Of wit and grace and ardour, and strong roots, Fruits perishable, imperishable fruits; Furrowed to likeness of the dim grey main Behind the black obliterating cyclone. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this plan does not prove to be safe. During summer travel, in countries pestered with gnats, a smoke fire for the horses (that is, a fire for keeping off flies), made near the place, will attract the horses and cause them to trample all about. This is an excellent way of obliterating ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... when he taught that the hierarchy was null and that tithes should not be paid. He came to an untimely end; but the influence of his doctrines continued so strong in Antwerp that St. Norbert came to the help of the local clergy and succeeded in obliterating all traces ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... pontifical, rapped with his bow on his rack, lifted his violin to his chin, and—an obliterating sponge was passed over Sylvia's memory. All the queer, uncomfortable talk, the unpleasant voices, the angry or malicious or uneasy eyes, the unkindly smiling lips, all were washed away out of her mind. The smooth, swelling current of the music was like oil on ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... of subjective personal emotion could not long be denied in lyric poetry. Even LECONTE DE LISLE had not succeeded in obliterating its traces entirely, and if he achieved a calm that justifies the epithet impassible, given so freely to him and to his followers, it is at the cost of a struggle that still vibrates beneath the surface of his lines. Presently emotion asserted its authority ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... month after month, in summer; the pestilence in town and camp mowed down Catholic and Protestant with perfect impartiality during the winter, while the remorseless ocean swept over all in its wrath, obliterating in an hour ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... results of this policy are before us. It may be said that the tendency now is altogether in the direction of excess; that some Christians are becoming much too liberal, and are fast obliterating all old landmarks. All I have to say to this is, that the more true it is, the better for my position. For, granting, for argument's sake, all that is asserted, this fact shows that there is a reaction from an old and false sentiment, which even if excessive, is a healthy indication. And ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... The hard, polished snow took no imprint of the light foot, and the scent was no doubt less than it would have been on a rougher surface. Maybe, also, the rogue had considered the chances of another sleigh coming along, before the hound, and obliterating the trail entirely. ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... last process. The eyes it was that disturbed the unity of effect in Lamb's waking face. They gave a restlessness to the character of his intellect, shifting, like northern lights, through every mode of combination with fantastic playfulness, and sometimes by fiery gleams obliterating for the moment that pure light of benignity which was the predominant reading on his features. Some people have supposed that Lamb had Jewish blood in his veins, which seemed to account for his gleaming eyes. It ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... absurdity. We shall find that, in our efforts to eliminate the old vices of class government, we are impeded and defeated by new products of the worst class theory. We shall find that all the schemes for producing equality and obliterating the organization of society produce a new differentiation based on the worst possible distinction—the right to claim and the duty to give one man's effort for another man's satisfaction. We shall find that every effort ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... party raised a popular commotion against him, by which his life was endangered, and he was compelled for a time to withdraw from the city. Tranquillity was soon however restored by the interference of the public authority, and the council proceeded vigorously in obliterating the last vestiges of Romish superstition. Ridley throughout his own diocese now caused the altars to be removed from the churches, and communion-tables to be placed in their room; and, as if by way of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... wave he saw her go, saw too, the white face of his engineer framed in the engine-room doorway, which a wave filled just as she turned, obliterating the face forever. ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... in the majority of cases, it is really little better) that, with excess of boldness, commingles its cramped, unpleasing outlines with the forest's wealth of foliage; and has reared its unshapely structure on the site of the historic wigwam, obliterating, in its ruthless, intrusive, advent, that lingering relic of the picturesque aspect of Indian life—a relic that, with its emblems and inner garniture of war, bids a scion of the race indulge a prideful retrospect ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... you a subject for the mad hospital?" said the wine-shop keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with a handful of mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it. "Why do you write in the public streets? Is there—tell me thou—is there no other place to write such ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... misery and despair of his situation returned with intense force, and as it crushed him down, obliterating every vestige of hope, once more his head sank forward on the desk and he groaned aloud. For a long time he remained thus, living over the past three weeks of agony, and then there smote upon his tortured nerves the sound of many clocks striking one. It sounded as if they were mocking him, and from ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... conference of leading bankers and manufacturers met at the Treasury to consider best way of grappling with unprecedented financial situation created by events of past fortnight. Happy thought to include in invitation his predecessor at the Treasury. In accordance with patriotic spirit obliterating party animosity, SON AUSTEN promptly accepted invitation. Gives valuable assistance to LLOYD GEORGE in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... seen an anxious, intent young face with eyes fixed upon vacancy, or an idle, if somewhat begrimed and parti-coloured hand, fiercely clutching a dejected head; but nearly all were already busily at work, eagerly painting, or as eagerly obliterating strokes too hastily made. The subject, hackneyed as it certainly is, had pleased and stimulated the girls. There was a mingled vagueness and familiarity in its suggestion which puzzled them and spurred them ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... their calculation, and began a second, and confused this, too, and began a third, upon which they became quite confounded. "What are you doing there?" asked the King at last. "You go on working and obliterating your work; what have you discovered?" "O King," replied they, "we find that the stranger has entered the town, but not by any gate. He appears to have passed in between Heaven and earth, like a bird. After this, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... early rise of the science of geometry among the Egyptians by reference to the necessity they were under each year of re-establishing the boundaries of their fields—the inundation obliterating old landmarks and divisions. The science thus forced upon their attention was cultivated with zeal and success. A single papyrus has been discovered ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... of time since the year 1255, when the people of Reggio sacked and destroyed Canossa, for Nature to resume her undisputed sway by obliterating the handiwork of men; and at present Nature forms the chief charm of Canossa. Lying one afternoon of May on the crisp short grass at the edge of a precipice purple with iris in full blossom, I surveyed, from ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... fellow men. Behind a mask of glass he dreams his hell: With chemic skill, to pack so fierce a dust Within the thunderbolt of one small shell— Sating in vivid thought his shuddering lust— Whole cities in one gasp of flame shall die, Swept with an all-obliterating rain Of sudden fire and poison from the sky; Nothing that breathes be left to breathe again— And only gloating eyes from out the air Watching the twisting fires, and ears attent For children's cries ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... of Piero's played riot among them, obliterating every trace of beauty, every claim of Venice, every question as to his own judgment or Marina's reasoning—even the ignominy of the secret flight. "Thy ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... speechless amazement—amazement that was dangerously near to horror. It was his aunt's face indeed, but it was her face of forty years ago, the vacant innocent face of a girl. He had heard stories of that strange effect of terror which could wipe a human countenance clean of other emotions, obliterating all previous expressions; but he had never realised that it could be literally true, or could mean anything so simply horrible as what he now saw. For the dreadful signature of overmastering fear was written plainly in that utter vacancy ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... fiction has a right to assert himself as the narrator, provided that he be a person of interest and charm. It remains for us to consider the various moods in which, in such a case, the writer may look upon his story. The self-obliterating author endeavors to hide his own opinion of the characters, in order not to interfere with the reader's independence of judgment concerning them; but the author who writes personally does not hesitate to reveal, nor even to express directly, ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... again and brushed, brushed mechanically—forgot himself in that occupation. The tumult of his thoughts ended in a sluggish flow of reflection, such as, after the outburst of a volcano, the almost imperceptible progress of a stream of lava, creeping languidly over a convulsed land and pitilessly obliterating any landmark left by the shock of the earthquake. It is a destructive but, by comparison, it is a peaceful phenomenon. Alvan Hervey was almost soothed by the deliberate pace of his thoughts. His moral landmarks were going one by ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... how clever lady artists become when they happen to be the wives of successful painters, but it is a significant fact that while all writers seem to agree that marriage is the cause of obliterating artistic ambition in women, it has in many cases been the birth of genius; and while domestic companionship with an artist will make a woman a painter, no caricaturist has ever succeeded in making his wife a humorist in art, and I shall ask Mr. Sterry what he means by placing "graphic caricature" ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... carrying with it, by inevitable consequence, that social equality to which they are determined never to submit. If the doctrine of political equality, so fundamental, to our system of government, is ever to be extended so as to embrace the colored man, it can only be done by overcoming and utterly obliterating this ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... such beauty as nature may have given them, the lower races exercise an almost diabolical ingenuity in obliterating or mutilating it. Hundreds of their visitors have written of certain tribes that they would not be bad looking if they would only leave nature alone. Not a single feature, from the feet to the eyeballs, has ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... that effort over himself which, it may be remembered, was possible to him in extremity. By a concentration of will equal to that which would be needed to cow a tiger, he had succeeded in obliterating for a moment the fatal grin upon his face. For an instant he no longer laughed. This effort could not last long. Rebellion against that which is our law or our fatality must be short-lived; at times the waters of the sea resist the power of gravitation, swell into ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... large, were almost indistinguishable from the presence of the most singular eyelashes I had ever seen. Intensely black, intensely thick, and even tangled in their profusion, they bristled rather than fringed her eyelids, obliterating everything but the shining black pupils beneath, which were like certain lustrous hairy mountain berries. It was this woodland suggestion that seemed to uncannily connect her with the ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... incursions on his prospect from some chance Vandal that may enter his neighborhood. He need not painfully economize and manage how he may use it all; he can afford to leave some of it wild, and to carry out his own plans without obliterating those ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... in her own inmost soul. That mysterious moment remained merely as an astonishment. It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to her; she had simply been swept away by some unfathomable madness. And at present Nature's first law was working in her with obliterating force. Would the man tell? Here in the sane and ordered surroundings, with mamma sleeping and satisfied one floor below, and a long, long letter to be written to her knight among men the first thing to-morrow, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... name—not one of the inhabitants proposed to remove to Hungary. No doubt the goodness of the soil had something to do with this decision, but, more, the liberal methods of the Serbs. No military service was as yet exacted—all that the Magyars had been asked to do was to work for two months in obliterating the ravages of war. The priest and the schoolmaster who had come from Hungary before the War still exercised their functions, and—in contrast with what had previously been the case—both the Magyar and the Serbian language were taught, the latter from the third class ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... and carelessly in two heavy braids, arranged about her head in such a manner as to permit stray wisps of hair to escape about her face and neck. She was dressed in a loose pink wrapper, all too plainly of home manufacture, gathered in at the waist, and successfully obliterating any lines that might indicate the existence of any grace of form, and sadly spotted and stained with grease and dirt. Her red stout arms ended in thick and redder hands, decked with an array of black-rimmed nails. At his first glance, sweeping her "tout ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... never have thought about obliterating our trail in the pine needles, yet now saw that it was a very necessary thing to do, for men can not crawl on their stomachs without mussing the ground if it is at all soft. In the morning those fellows would see our tracks leading from the palmetto ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... which he had left the house, his father called without receiving an answer. He then lighted a lantern and with the eldest daughter, Martha, who insisted on accompanying him, went in search. A light snow had fallen, obliterating the path, but making the young man's trail conspicuous; each footprint was plainly defined. After going a little more than half-way—perhaps seventy-five yards—the father, who was in advance, halted, and elevating his lantern stood peering intently ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... The fear of the obliterating darkness known to all the woods people pressed close upon her and appalled her. She loved life simply and primitively; and it was an unspeakable thing to lose at the end of such a battle. Out so far, surrounded by such endless, desolate wastes ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... pansy petals hung heavily from the lashes, but the corners of the mouth turned up in an adorable smile, and waves of gratitude and delight swept up from chin to brow obliterating the agony of ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... concentrating her faculties and focusing them upon the object to be attained, the purpose to be accomplished. At the same time she finds that a more subtle process has been going on in her own mind. An insensible alchemy has been widening her horizon, getting rid of prejudice, obliterating old, narrow lines, leaving in their place a willingness to see the good in Nazareth as ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... "ifs," "buts," "perhaps's," "what do we know," etc., heaped together, a shapeless and unconnected system is formed, perplexing mankind, by obliterating from their minds, the most clear ideas and rendering uncertain truths most evident. By reason of this systematic confusion, nature is an enigma; the visible world has disappeared, to give place to regions invisible; reason is compelled to yield to imagination, who leads to ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... suffered the violence and terror of that plummet drop, must have felt the tearing clutch of pointed rocks in the wall face, must have known the leaping upward of the earth, the whine of wind in his bursting ears, the dizzy spinning, the rending, obliterating ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... it him, boys!" cried O'Riley, pushing the carpenter flat down, and obliterating his black beard and his whole visage in a mass of snow. Several of the wilder spirits among the men leaped on the prostrate Grim, and nearly smothered him before he could gather himself up for a struggle; then they fled in all directions while their victim regained his ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... part. Small benefit was destined to accrue, as the history of Europe unrolled through the succeeding years, from the fall of the house of Burgundy. For while Louis XI by his evil plotting had enlarged his kingdom, by obliterating the barrier of Burgundy between France and Austria he had at the same time made way for centuries of wars. "Here," said the 15th Louis before the tomb of the last duke of Burgundy, "is the cradle of all our wars." As for Switzerland, the system of mercenary ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... flowers, where the lotus and the cherry, the plum and wistaria, grow wantonly side by side; a land where the bamboo embosoms the maple, where the pine at last has found its palm-tree, and the tropic and the temperate zones forget their separate identity in one long self-obliterating kiss. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... mind for him, and Sam lay in bed and looked at the moon gradually working its way over the undulating abdominal hill, wondering what was in his mind. The hill dropped, showing the full face of the moon, and then rose again obliterating it. ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... in the palace a pompous eunuch had stepped before the Emperor quite obliterating him. I saw Kuang Hsu put his hands on the large man's shoulders, and quietly turn him around, that he might see before whom he stood. There were no signs of anger on his face, but rather a gentle, pathetic smile as he looked ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... Administrator had been reared in that atmosphere; but when he began to think out such questions for himself, he realized that density of population and rapid inter-communication afforded by electric and steam railroads, motors, aeroplanes, telegraphs and telephones were, to all practical purposes, obliterating State lines and molding the country into a ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... was profuse in her expressions of concern for the hero of the Hawk and Raven. The feverish gleam in his dark eyes and the pain that marked his face touched her deeply. Suffering softened his lean, sun-browned features, obliterating the mocking lines that had impressed her so unfavorably at the outset. She was saying to herself that he was handsome after a most unusual cast; it was ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... population to Cairo. The order was to decapitate the victims, and bring their heads in sacks to Cairo to be exhibited to the people. Eugene Beauharnais accompanied Croisier, who joyfully set out on this horrible expedition, in hope of obliterating all recollection ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... was not. Beautiful is the wilderness at all times, at all times lovely, but under the spell of the twilight it seems to enfold one in a tender embrace, pushing back the sordid, the commonplace, and obliterating those magnified nothings that form the weary burden of civilised man. With keen appreciation we tramped steadily on till at last we perceived through the night gloom the cheerful flicker of our camp-fire, a sight always welcome, for the camp-fire ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... the window again, and looked down upon the ravine from which the darkness now seemed to be slowly welling up and obliterating the landscape, and then, taking a book from his valise, settled himself in the easy-chair by the fire. He was in no hurry to join the party below, whom he had duly recognized and greeted as he passed through. ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... psychic figures behaved badly. Some were in focus, others not so. Some were lighted from the right, while the sitter was from the left; some were comely ... others not so. Some monopolized the major portion of the plate, quite obliterating the material sitters.... But here is the point: Not one of these figures which came out so strongly in the negative was visible in any form or shape to me during the time of exposure in the camera, and I vouch in the strongest manner for the fact that no one whatever had ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... future, that strange, sad war is hurrying even now to be forgotten. The camp, the drill, the lines of sentries, the prisons, the hospitals—(ah! the hospitals!)—all have passed away—all seem now like a dream. A new race, a young and lusty generation, already sweeps in with oceanic currents, obliterating the war, and all its scars, its mounded graves, and all its reminiscences of hatred, conflict, death. So let It be obliterated. I say the life of the present and the future makes undeniable demands upon us each and all, south, north, east, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... honest Mussulman about thirty years old, with a thick, coal-black beard and passionate, irritable features, whose true character was very fairly reflected in his pair of flashing black eyes. His turban was drawn deep down over his temples, obliterating his eyebrows completely, which made him ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... back. In his excitement and preoccupation he had quite forgotten his long exposure to the sun during his active exercise, and that he was poorly equipped for the cold sea-fog which the heat had brought in earlier, and which now was quietly obliterating sea and shore. This made his progress slower and more difficult, and by the time he had reached the lighthouse he was ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... over the spur that divided the outlaw's first retreat from the gorge proved a terrible task for the wounded man. For some distance the boy followed him, obliterating his tracks; but before the journey was half completed Ryder required all the assistance the half-caste could give him, and he reached the small cave in the side of the gorge, about a mile and a half from its entrance, in an exhausted ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... out the muck); unlike the mole he never succeeds in building a nest for himself. The heap diminishes gradually before him and he thinks he sees rock-bottom, when suddenly an avalanche comes down, obliterating marks of previous effort and storing up labor for days, weeks, or months ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... unnoticed, and the Irish precedent has survived to darken thought, to retard democratic progress, and to pervert domestic and Imperial policy to this very day. It even had the truly extraordinary retrospective effect of obliterating from the minds of many eminent statesmen the significance of the Canadian parallel; for it is only six years ago that a Secretary of State for the Colonies penned a despatch recommending for the Transvaal a form of government ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... was left a widower, with two children; and, after the death of his wife, so strong was his sense of the blessed comfort she had been to him, that he determined never to give any other woman an opportunity of obliterating the happy recollection. ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... a secret feeling that many a time, urged by her confessor, Madame de C. had been upon the point of obliterating or removing those extremely chaste nude images. But at the last moment rose up the horror of voluntarily changing anything in the homestead, transforming a whole room that she always had known thus, and perhaps the unavowed fear of our ridicule and reproach, had made her ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... helm up and headed the boat straight for the reeds, into the midst of which she plunged a minute later, pushing them easily aside as she drove through them, while they closed up again behind her, effectually screening her from view from the river, and as effectually obliterating the track which she ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... unusually rich in those quaint and stately edifices where the gentry of the shire used to make their winter abodes, in a provincial metropolis. Almost everywhere, nowadays, there is a monotony of modern brick or stuccoed fronts, hiding houses that are older than ever, but obliterating the picturesque antiquity ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... head of the Gulf of Carpentaria appear to be a compound of many others, obliterating the common daily difference, and producing only one tide in 24 hours. The direction of the flood stream commences at South-South-East, changing gradually to South-South-West as it terminates; that of the ebb ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... our readers have not been wearied by this somewhat extended investigation of the Mound Builders. Every storm that beats upon their works tends to level them. The demands of our modern life are fast obliterating the remaining monuments and, indeed, it is now only those which are situated in favorable localities, or are massive in construction, that are left for our inspection. But these nearly obliterated records of the past are of more than passing interest to us as monuments of the prehistoric times ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... and shovel with them, and, dividing the bags, buried them at some distance apart, rolling stones to cover up the hiding- places, and obliterating any signs of the ground having been disturbed. A hundred pounds were left out, and with this in their saddle-bags they arrived ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... expect to find me in ruins, after—let me see, how many years?" she laughed. "The hand of Time is heavy, but not necessarily obliterating. What has become ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... of the "Sea of Serenity'' — what a name for such a scene! — and observe how it has been rent with almost inconceivable violence, the wall of the colossal crater Posidonius dropping vertically upon the ancient shore and obliterating it, while its giant neighbor, Le Monnier, opens a yawning mouth as if to swallow the sea itself. A scene like this makes one question whether, after all, those may not be right who have imagined that the so-called sea ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... understand better and to feel more the truth as it is in Jesus, and to cleave closer to Him who is the truth. Do they enlighten the understanding? Do they engrave deeper the loved face carven on the tablets of memory, which the attrition of worldly cares is ever obliterating, and the lichens of worldly thoughts ever filling up? Do they clear out the rubbish from the channels of the heart, that the cleansing stream may flow through them? Do they, through the senses, minister to the soul its own proper ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... up a pungent smoke forming a heavy cloud like some strange blue tree sheltering the form of the idol against the green sky. Save for the faint wailing of the distant women there was silence, in which an owl screeched harshly, a good omen. Little flames flickered. The smoke grew denser, obliterating the figure of the King. The drums began to mutter, Bakahenzie cried out in a ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... walk about in the garden. From time to time, she stops to pull up a weed; methodically, she breaks off the flowers hanging faded from their stalks; occasionally, she makes a reference, full of sound sense, to the care required by plants and vegetables. But my will passes like an obliterating line over all that we say, over all that we do; and, while Rose anxiously tries to fill the silence, I lie in wait, ready for a word, a sigh, a look that will enable me to go straight to the heart of that soul, which I am eager to grasp even as we take in our hand a mysterious object of which ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... caught the quick eye of old Hyslop was a fresh brand, or "buist," on the ewe's nose; the letter "O" was newly burned there, nearly obliterating an old letter "T." The latter was Mr. Gibson's fire-brand; "O" that of his not distant neighbour, Murdison, tenant in Ormiston. Gibson and Murdison were on friendly terms, and both were highly respectable and respected ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... the pressure of the Germans who swept through the Alps and down the Danube and forced the Slovene vojvodes to acknowledge their suzerainty and accept their religion. The Germans would doubtless have succeeded in obliterating them had not the Magyar invasion weakened their offensive. The Slovenes, however, were left a wrecked nationality whose fate became blended with that of the Habsburg possessions and who against the forces of geography—which firmly bound them to the Croats—were politically ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... conclusive reason for dissolution. As neither of these causes entitles married persons to divorce it is at once clear that our marriage law is not founded on either assumption. What it is really founded on is the morality of the tenth commandment, which English women will one day succeed in obliterating from the walls of our churches by refusing to enter any building where they are publicly classed with a man's house, his ox, and his ass, as his purchased chattels. In this morality female adultery is malversation by the woman and theft by the man, whilst ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... the face, obliterating the satire, and veiling the brilliant eyes. Then with an effort Philippa drives away ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... and bring down its temperature. The churches are clogged and impeded, and their whole tone lowered and chilled, by a mass of worldly men and women. Nothing is gained, and much is in danger of being lost, by obliterating the lines between the church and the world. The Jew who thought little of the difference between the Samaritan worship with its polytheism, and his own monotheism, was in peril of dropping to the Samaritan level. The Samaritan who was accepted ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... tribes, the prevalence of smallpox and cholera among them, the spread of civilization, confirmed nomadism, traces of Jewish rites, and so on, thanked him for a "very profitable half-hour," and said he should send a little check to be applied in any way he might see fit, obliterating thereby the last trace of the previous prejudice. This, indeed, was replaced by something very like enthusiasm when there came next day a slip of paper representing five hundred dollars, also a note from the donor, saying that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... undoubtedly aided materially in obliterating sectionalism. That achievement was one of its avowed objects. There is no question but it assisted in cementing North and South; and that it has brought East and West into closer sympathy is equally true. Other farm organizations have found their incentive in the order. These it has ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... the hill— And let there follow Sleep, Which is God's tidal Will That overflows The world—obliterating ill, And in its soothing sweep Murmuring more of ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... the Drinking-Glasses inscribed to the Beauties of our Age; a furious Mob at an Election breaks the Windows of a contrary Party; and a cleanly Landlord must have, forsooth, his Rooms new painted and white-wash'd every now and then, without regarding in the least the Wit and Learning he is obliterating, or the worthy Authors, any more than when he shall have their Company: But I may venture to say, That good Things are not always respected as they ought to be: The People of the World will sometimes overlook ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1 • Samuel Johnson [AKA Hurlo Thrumbo]
... went so far as to deny all motives as influencing moral action. Such a contention, however, clearly defeats its own object by reducing all action to chance. On the other hand, the scientific doctrine of evolution has gone far towards obliterating the distinction between external and internal compulsion, e.g. motives, character and the like. In so far as man can be shown to be the product of, and a link in, a long chain of causal development, so far does it become impossible to regard him as self-determined. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... clear to the mill without another word; without even a grin from the broad-faced Ole, who sat in ponderous thought in the wagon ahead. To a nature such as his the infrequency of a new idea gives it the force of a cataclysm; during its presence, obliterating everything else. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... or would on the morrow, yet vivid in my memory, obliterating every event that had come before or after, there remained the last scene before the gust of smoke blinded my eyes and the narrow slit that had given me sight of the interior of her cell closed between me and the Princess of Helium ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... swept through it as if it were not there, obliterating time and space. It was as though the Heavenly Host had descended upon the earth, sweet, wonderful, and yet terrible, with a sweep of pinions, deep-drawn breath—Tubal Cain and his kind, deified and yet human in their immense ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... the hands of Lao Tzu's more immediate followers, Tao became the Absolute, the First Cause, and finally One in whose obliterating unity all seemingly opposed conditions of time and space were indistinguishably blended. This One, the source of human life, was placed beyond the limits of our visible universe; and in order for human life ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... freshness, and the more he inhaled her sweetness, the more the image of Eugenie Gontier was gradually effaced from his memory, like one of those tableaux on the stage, which gauze curtains, descending from the flies, seem to absorb without removing, gradually obliterating the pictures as ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... man was sprinting across the stretch of green—a clean-cut young man in gray flannels. At the first sight of him, Katrina caught her breath sharply and blushed. It was Katrina's despair that she blushed so easily. As the young man neared them the spectators achieved the effect of obliterating themselves from the landscape. They melted into space. There remained the young man, Mr. Connor, and a ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... to his future happiness in life that he should be the master in his own house. And he felt that he could not be so unless he should be known to have been right in this terrible misfortune with which their married life had been commenced. There was no obliterating it, no forgetting it, no ignoring it. He had in his passion sent her away from him, and, passionately, she had withdrawn. Let them not say a word about it, there would still have been this terrible event in both their memories. And for himself ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... mixtures within mixtures. And what is the British Empire? A conglomeration of races and languages, a pan-national product of conquest and colonization, in which the forces of racial modification are always at work obliterating old divisions and creating new claims to ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Their memoirs far too often only reveal to us a hazy something, certainly not recognizable as a man. This is generally the fault of their editors, who, though men themselves, confine their editorial duties to going up and down the diaries and papers of the departed saint, and obliterating all human touches. This they do for the "better prevention of scandals"; and one cannot deny that they attain their end, though they pay ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... hours of patient work with a dictionary, she was still extremely hesitant as to meanings. Now, she blindly forged ahead,—amid a profound hush—attributing to the Pious AEneas a most amazing set of actions. She finished; and the slaughter commenced. Miss Lord spent three minutes in obliterating Rosalie; then passed the lines to ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... these years; I don't know. Perhaps I am still mad. But I vowed that Ruth should never suffer the way I did—and do. For I still love her mother. So I undertook to protect her by keeping love out of her life, by crushing it whenever it appeared, obliterating it. I made it a point to bring beachcombers to the house to fill her with horror of mankind. I never let her read stories, or have pets, dolls. Anything that might stir the sense of love And God has mocked me ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... Layard, when holding a judicial office at Point Pedro in 1849. A native who had been defrauded of his land complained before him of his neighbour, who, during his absence, had removed their common landmark, diverting the original watercourse and obliterating its traces by filling it up to a level with the rest of the field. Mr. Layard directed a trench to be sunk at the contested spot, and discovering numbers of the Ampullaria, the remains of the eggs, and the living animal which had been buried for months, the evidence was so resistless ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... Korvan has found out that it always seems to happen after a day when they felt feverish and very thirsty, and then felt all right again. You tried out something that made you feverish and thirsty. I had it too, in the ship. Korvan thinks there's been an epidemic of something that is obliterating the blue spots on everybody that catches it. There are always trivial epidemics that nobody notices. Korvan's found evidence of one that's making blueskin no longer a word ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... warm and brilliant, began to grow more and more dim, as a thick haze spread through the atmosphere overhead, foretokening an approaching storm—an event which might prove entirely disastrous to their hopes, by obliterating all vestiges of the pursued. As the gallant old hunter moved onward with rapid strides—preceded by the faithful brute, which, on the regular trail, greatly facilitated their progress, by saving the company ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... of other two streams foamed into it through rock-rifts, loud-throated on either hand. Thenceforward the water which had threaded the large boulders in heavy strands coiled like monstrous braids of snaky locks, rose up and drew together above their tallest heads into a single obliterating fold, as it slid on smoothly with only now and then a quiver puckering its surface, as if it had rolled over some live creature that writhed. Its mounded solidity made its rapid motion look strange and terrible. Where ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... Plan.—Persons whose conversion takes place after they are grown up are wont to look back upon the period of their life which has preceded this event with sorrow and shame and to wish that an obliterating hand might blot the record of it out of existence. St. Paul felt this sentiment strongly: to the end of his days he was haunted by the specters of his lost years, and was wont to say that he was the least of all the apostles, who was not worthy to be called an apostle, ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker |
