"Obliterating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tall and broad shouldered, and so the old man had little difficulty in fitting one of the suits of armor to him, obliterating the devices so that none might guess to whom it had belonged. This he did, and from then on the boy never rode abroad except in armor, and when he met others upon the high road, his visor was always lowered that none ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 male adultery with an unmarried woman ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... hell-sprung venom soaks secretly into the oldest, the dearest and the truest friendship. Yes, let it be for once said, the viper-like venom of envy—the most loyal, the most honourable, the most self-forgetting and self-obliterating friendship is never in this life for one moment proof against it. We live by admiration; yes, but even where we admire our most and live our best this mildew still falls with its deadly damp. What did ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... heights at Fredericksburg, in the wilderness of Chancellorsville, on the glorious ridge of Gettysburg. Comrades of the bivouac and the mess! ye are not forgotten in that sleep upon the fields where swept the infernal tide of battle, obliterating so much glorious life, leaving so much desolation! Even amid the roar of cannon, exulting in their might for destruction, amid the shrieking of the merciless shells, amid the blaze of the deadly musketry, memories of you occur to us. We resolve that your lives shall not have been sacrificed ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... as they to furrow up The 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
... 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 Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... have been fabricated in successive portions, and were committed to writing in the course of many centuries by different individuals. From such a mode of origination, a mass of contradictions is inseparable, and the improving hand of a later editor could never be capable of entirely obliterating them." ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... those fearful words 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
... dim buttes from the rocks of the world primeval when man 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
... bunk-house, and while that fiery mixture warmed her lame back, the thought of its origin probably warmed her lonely heart. I have suddenly wakened up to the fact that Struthers is getting on a bit. She is still the same efficient and self-obliterating mainstay of the kitchen that she ever was, but she grows more "sot" in her ways, more averse to any change in her daily routine, and more despairing of ever finally and completely capturing that ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... gleaming serpent still at play—still writhing along, still obliterating the few score scattered fugitives that some way, somehow, had slipped by the ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... real ramparts and escarpments of Todos Santos—the impenetrable and unassailable fog! Corroding its brass and iron with saline breath, rotting its wood with unending shadow, sapping its adobe walls with perpetual moisture, and nourishing the obliterating vegetation with its quickening blood, as if laughing to scorn the puny embattlements of men—it still bent around the crumbling ruins the tender grace of ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... among them, and mutterings of hatred and revenge; for Burns had been popular—the best-liked man among them all. Jones, wrought to the highest pitch, had even shed a few shamefaced tears, and was obliterating the humiliating memory by an extra ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the struggle for existence. Crops shot up rank and strong in the short Northern summer. Soft cloud masses sailed over the island, and rain-storms marched across it with drums of thunder which sent reverberations along the water world. Or fogs rolled in, muffling and obliterating homesteads. ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... 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 ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... addressed to Admiral von Tirpitz, who had just retired for the ostensible reason that he was unwell, but whose illness was patently only diplomatic. The good pastor expressed the hope that his early recovery would permit the admiral to continue his noble work of obliterating England. Pastor Falk, of Berlin, is a typical fire-eater. His Whitsuntide address was an attack upon Anglo-Saxon civilisation and the urgent German mission of smashing Britain and America. The Easter sermons of hate, one of which ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... more eager now to find Elizabeth than he had been to separate from her only a brief time before. He looked to the right and left in search of her, but the moon was obscured now by thin gray clouds, and a fog drifting up from the ocean was fast obliterating the crowd of golden stars that had been so ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... meeting, except at long intervals, is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave system. But it is in harmony with the grand aim of slavery, which, always and everywhere, is to reduce man to a level with the brute. It is a successful method of obliterating{29 "OLD MASTER"} from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... was turned to prompt account by Mr. Edgar S. 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 as to confound ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... rights 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 ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... he picked up his pen, for he could not repress himself, and continued the text in this wise: "By burning the flower, (Hua-Hsi Jen) and dispersing the musk, (She Yueeh), the consequence will be that the inmates of the inner chambers will, eventually, keep advice to themselves. By obliterating Pao-ch'ai's supernatural beauty, by reducing to ashes Tai-yue's spiritual perception, and by destroying and extinguishing my affectionate preferences, the beautiful in the inner chambers as well as the plain will then, at length, be put on the same ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Paramore's disease while it is the most farcical thing in the play is also the most philosophic and important. The rest of the figures, including the Philanderer himself, are in the full sense of those blasting and obliterating words "funny without being vulgar," that is, funny without being of any importance to the masses of men. It is a play about a dashing and advanced "Ibsen Club," and the squabble between the young Ibsenites and the old ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— 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 ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... destination, and had the telegraph-wires been in successful operation he would have hazarded the experiment of requesting her arrest at the terminus of the railway; but this was impracticable, and each succeeding hour aided in obliterating the only clue in ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... plain man on such matters as these are not very clear, and what he says about sensations and things is not always edifying. But it is clear that he feels strongly that the man who would identify them is obliterating a distinction to which his experience testifies unequivocally. We must not hastily disregard his protest. He is sometimes right in his feeling that things are not identical, even when ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... and bored his three holes very neatly. This done be rubbed them over with a handful of sand, and smoothed over with sand all traces of sawdust, heaved the boat back, so that she rested again in her original position; and retired, sweeping his coat behind him, and obliterating ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... remains of a discoloured moustache and whiskers, hanging over the upper lip, and over the hollows where the cheeks had once been, made the head just recognisable as the head of a man. Over all the features death and time had done their obliterating work. The eyelids were closed. The hair on the skull, discoloured like the hair on the face, had been burnt away in places. The bluish lips, parted in a fixed grin, showed the double row of teeth. By slow degrees, the hovering head (perfectly ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... blouse with a street suit; a brunette, but of a tinting so delicate that she fairly sparkled, she took the shine off those blonde girls. Her small beautifully formed, uncovered head had the living jet of the crow's wing; her great eyes, long-lashed and sumptuously set, showed ebon irises almost obliterating the white. Dark, shining, she was a night ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... took off the saddle and bridle. After a little consideration he diverted the current, then dug a hole on the lower side of the animal, rolled him into it, and changed the brook back into its old channel. Carefully obliterating all traces of his work, he returned to the cabin, bolted the door, lay down against it so that no one could enter, ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... considerable effect; most of them seemed to make the letters blacker, probably by cleaning the surface; and the acids, after having been rubbed strongly on the letters, did not strike any deeper tinge with the phlogisticated alkali. Nothing had a sensible effect toward obliterating these letters but what took off part of the surface of the vellum, when small rolls, as of a dirty matter, were to be perceived. It is therefore unquestionable, that no iron was used in this ink; and from its resistance to the chemical solvents, as well as a certain clotted appearance ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... Desperately obliterating all expression from his face, and hoping that his eyes were not anxious, Nick took from his pocket a gold bag whose diamonds, alternating with sapphires, sparkled as ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... 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 ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... all the even and hopeless monotony, all the dull and barren plane of life had suddenly erupted into one towering and consuming passion for activity, for return to his old world with its gentle anaesthesia of ever-widening plans and its obliterating and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... 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 locality. I ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... 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 of the affair ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... passage from the ancient to the modern through all the dialects which must have flourished one after the other in the intermediate ages, implies a want of reflection on the laws which govern the recording as well as the obliterating processes. ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... top of the snow, but 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, "All ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... 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 ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... and mental attitude all need study. Its history has been dealt with in separate fragments, by states, or towns, or in discussions of special phases, such as German and Scotch-Irish immigration. The Old West as a whole can be appreciated only by obliterating the state boundaries which conceal its unity, by correlating the special and fragmentary studies, and by filling the gaps in the material for understanding the formation of its society. The present paper is ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... she was trying to see the universe also, the great background of their two little lives, and to think what it might mean for her over and above their too obliterating relationship. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... milk-flowing. It is parasitic on Lactarius, probably piperatus, as this species surrounded it. It seems to have the power to change the color into an orange-red mass, in many cases entirely obliterating the gills of the host-species, as will ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... on brown 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
... bastion one evening in August of 1825, happily led to a reconciliation. Beethoven's eyes were at last opened to the injustice done Von Breuning, upon which he wrote him a letter, so imbued with penitence, so fraught with the desire of obliterating his past unkindness, so filled with yearning and tenderness, that it must have compensated Stephen for all the pain of the ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... the organization. It was a period of incessant warfare. Nearly every local conference was a scene of dissension; many of the branches were dissolved; and disruption in the Latin countries was gradually obliterating whatever there was of actual organization. It all resolved itself into a question of domination between Bakounin and Marx. The war between Germany and France prevented an international gathering, and it was not until September, 1872, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... whiskered faces. Here and there we see gliding along the well-dressed lady (not well dressed, indeed, as far as becomingness goes, but fashionably), with a gown of triple flounces, whose skirt intrudes even upon the shoulders, obliterating the waist entirely, while her throat is lost in an immense frill of four or more ranks; and sometimes a large shawl over all completes the disguise of the shape. The head of the dame or damsel is usually enveloped in a gauze or silk bonnet, sufficiently large to spread, were it laid upon a table, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... front doorstep, contemplating with secret despair the jungle of weeds and shrubbery that lay before him, completely obliterating the ancient path down to the gate. The whole place was overgrown with long, broken weeds, battered into tangled masses by the blasts of winter; at his feet were heaps of smitten burdocks and the dead, smothered stems ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... has brought a lady's maid with her whom she addresses, more Anglico, simply by her surname of "Struthers." Struthers is a submerged and self-obliterating and patient-eyed woman of nearly forty, I should say, with a face that would be both intelligent and attractive, if it weren't so subservient. But I've a floaty sort of feeling that this same maid knows a little more than she lets ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... knowledge." And he put the 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 had temporarily made ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... blankets, and looking for the first time in his life guilty of some enormous crime. Nothing however had disappeared. Jean said, "Me feeks lits tous les jours." And every morning he aired and made our beds for us, and we mounted to find him smoothing affectionately some final ruffle, obliterating with enormous solemnity some microscopic crease. We gave him cigarettes when he asked for them (which was almost never) and offered them when we knew he had none or when we saw him borrowing from someone else whom his ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... to Henry's account of Madeline's case. The success of galvanism in obliterating the obnoxious train of recollections in her case would depend, he said, on whether it had been indulged to an extent to bring about a morbid state of the brain fibres concerned. What might be conventionally or morally morbid or objectionable, ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... 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 to ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... in the chair, leaned his head against the wall behind him, and the mist grew more dense, obliterating ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... civilization had wrought in obliterating everything that I had thought would be a guide to the old places I sought, I spoke to a police officer and asked him if be could tell me whether a very large tree had stood in that neighborhood or not before that street ...
— Chief of Scouts • W.F. Drannan
... of whom more than one-fourth have embraced Christianity, and it is understood that more than two-thirds of the population are favouring the progress of the gospel. Many thousands attend the schools of the missionaries, and the habit of reading is fast obliterating the original religion and superstitions ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... beside the river. There were traces of two trails leading to the spot, one being that of the same five horses they had been following so long, the other not so easily read, as it had been traversed in both directions, the different hoof marks obliterating each other. Bristoe, creeping about on hands and knees, studied the signs with ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... admission, only one conclusion seems possible. Read without prejudice or bias, the narrative of Genesis i, creates an impression at variance with the facts revealed by science." The eminent professor ends by saying that the efforts at reconciliation are "different modes of obliterating the characteristic features of Genesis, and of reading into it a view which it does ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... been plenty 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 what ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... from serious interruptions the prosperity—indeed, the existence—of a scattered body must depend. In time of peace it can be made a great consolidating force, fostering every sentiment of worthy local patriotism whilst obliterating all inclination to mischievous narrow particularism, and tending to perfect the unity which gives virtue to national grandeur and is the true secret ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... Austria—the German, Hungarian, Sclavonian, Latin, Wallachian, Turkish, modern Greek, Italian, Flemish and French. The new king formed the desperate resolve to fuse the discordant kingdom into one homogeneous mass, obliterating all distinctions of laws, religion, language and manners. It was a benevolent design, but one which far surpassed the power of man to execute. He first attempted to obliterate all the old national landmarks, and divided the kingdom into thirteen States, in each of which he instituted the ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... side as it is for the present, I resume, as to cutting to the true outline with the knife. You can begin where you like, but I generally clear the right side first. I cut through the pencil line, not entirely obliterating it (which you will not find easy), because, after awhile, I have to efface it altogether with a file, to a perfect, smooth line. These square corners—these curves of top, middle, and lower bouts—all and everything must be well done, and no one thing outside ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... that after he had brought out the red writing by the use of the sulpho-cyanide, and though he could count on Vera Lytton's placing the note in the jar of ammonia and hence obliterating the writing, while at the same time the invisible writing in the mercurous nitrate involving Dr. Dixon's name would be brought out by the ammonia indelibly on the other side of the note - he forgot" - Kennedy was now speaking eagerly and loudly - "that the sulpho-cyanide vapours could always ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... ink has been shed over the wickedness of the Spaniards in crossing the ocean and attacking people who had never done them any harm, overturning and obliterating a 'splendid civilization,' and more to the same effect. It is undeniable that unprovoked aggression is an extremely hateful thing, and many of the circumstances attendant upon the Spanish conquest in ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... 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 ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... and were impelled to parade sick. The troops to the north of Anzac fared the worst. The snow had been preceded by heavy falls of rain, converting the low-lying trenches into watercourses and in some cases obliterating them altogether. With the advent of the frost, men previously wet through had their garments frozen on them. Two hundred deaths followed from exposure and exhaustion. Some sentries were found still at their posts with the last spark of life departed. ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... slavery, and brought before her eyes the pictures he himself had seen, of the pale, stunted little victims of Mammon's greed, toiling by day and night in stifling, dangerous mines; in the Hell-glare of the glass-factories; in the hand-bruising, soul-obliterating Inferno of the coal-breakers; in the hot, linty, sickening atmosphere of the southern cotton-mills. And as he talked, she saw for the first time the figures of these bowed and bloodless little boys and girls, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... cancelled, by an obliterating stamp in the office where they are received, so that no postage stamp can ever be used a second time. Each post-office is furnished with a cancel stamp, and an ineffaceable ink for this purpose. There are five different forms of cancel stamps, one used for London ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... melody itself; and she has failed therefore to give satisfaction even in such works as "Faust" and "Aida," which are intermediate between the old-fashioned opera and the music-drama proper. I have been often surprised to hear how Patti, so conscientious in other respects, slights her texts, obliterating consonants and altering vowels after the fashion of the Italian school. Having neglected to master the more vigorous vowels and expressive consonants, she cannot assert her art in dramatic works. Her voice, ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... astonishment. Was this woman really Marguerite? . . . War was obliterating all her winning vanities. She was no longer fluttering about in bird-like fashion. Her feet were treading the earth with resolute firmness, calm and secure in the new strength which was developing within. When one of his caresses would remind ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the thickest snow-storm, or to be dispersed at will like glittering ice-crystals. At times the wind sweeps up large tracts of the dry ice-dust, and pours them down upon a deep-lying valley amid the mountains, or on to the summit of the passes, obliterating in a few seconds the laboriously excavated mountain road, at which a whole company of rutners have toiled for days. All these appearances resemble the avalanches of other Alps, but can not be regarded in the same light as the true snow-storm, the tormenta or guxeten. This ...
— Harper's Young People, February 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... sky and sea, where, such was their expanse, it was often possible to glimpse three different weathers in one sweeping glance. Away to the left, where, far out to sea, the Longships stuck a white finger out of the foam, a sudden squall might come up, obliterating lighthouse, headlands, all the sea to the cliff's foot, with its purple smother. Directly in front of him, below a piled mass of cumuli that hung darkly from zenith to horizon, a line of livid whiteness would show the sea's rim, while ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... death before the walls of Nancy, Count Louis' soldiers had no 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 ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... cook, betrayed at least an aptitude that was as creditable as it was opportune. She had also found time to do something—I had not the remotest idea what—to her dress that had gone a considerable way toward renovating its appearance and obliterating the disfigurement caused by the action of the sea water upon it; while in other ways she had spruced-up her appearance to an extent that excited my fervent but ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... 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, ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Zoological paper from North America, without observing the impress of Agassiz's doctrines—another proof, by the way, of how great a man he is. I was pleased and surprised to see A. Gray's remarks on crossing, obliterating varieties, on which, as you know, I have been collecting facts for these dozen years. How awfully flat I shall feel, if when I get my notes together on species, etc., etc., the whole thing explodes like an empty puff-ball. Do not ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... first time in this squalid, mean little room, the dark had balm in it, became a fragrant miracle, obliterating the harsh actualities of her immediate yesterdays and to-morrows, winging her spirit for a breathless flight straight to the end she sought,—to the time when the long pilgrimage before her ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... substance, when you try to make them out. Coats-of-arms were formerly emblazoned all round the hall, but have been almost rubbed out by people hanging their overcoats against them, or by women with dish-clouts and scrubbing-brushes, obliterating hereditary glories in their blind hostility to dust and spiders' webs. Full-length portraits of several English kings, Charles II. being the earliest, hang on the walls; and on the dais, or elevated part of the floor, stands an antique chair of state, which more than one royal character is traditionally ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... 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. ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... Oxford in giving me priests' orders on my college Demyship, whereby I was enabled to present myself to this living, and hold it, having at that time attained the canonical age. My courtship also and marriage, which befell in the year 1674, had great effect in obliterating past transactions. I was married on Thursday, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... 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 ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... I was using the words in a specific sense. What I mean by progress is the welding together of society for whatever ends. Progress is a centripetal movement, obliterating man in the mass. Civilization is centrifugal; it permits, it postulates, the assertion of personality. The terms are, therefore, not synonymous. They stand for hostile and divergent movements. Progress subordinates. Civilization co-ordinates. The individual ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... conscience? Confessing, she might at least be regarded as one who desired and meant to be honest. Confession would, anyhow, ease the weight of her load. Passively at last, from very weariness of thought, her mind was but going backward and forward over its own traces, heedlessly obliterating them, when suddenly a new and horrid consciousness emerged from the trodden slime— that she was glad that at least Sophy had the money! For one passing moment she was glad with the joy of Lady Macbeth, that what was done was done, and could not be altered. ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... so?" said the dwarf. "Now I have always thought that that transformation meant the phenomenon of the soul made visible, obliterating the form under the light of the spirit. If I were not loved I should stay hidden, that is all. You and yours, madame," he continued, addressing his mistress, "instead of having a dwarf at your service, will now have a ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... now at the window, where, toward dawn, a paling 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 Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... way before 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 ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... 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
... had its beauty—a beauty that seemed built upon a cruel, youthful, obliterating forgetfulness of the past—struck Clarence as keenly as when he had made up his mind that he must leave the place forever. For the tale of his mischance and ill-fortune, as told by Hopkins, was unfortunately ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... poor, thin, or colored ink, resulting in impressions which are too light and faint, or in which the ink has run, obliterating the ridges. The best results will be obtained by using heavy black printer's ink, a paste which should not be thinned before using. This ink will dry quickly and will not ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... with the warm silence, departed lingeringly. Belated insects still buzzed in the wayside foliage. A bee, overtaken in his busy pilfering by the obliterating dusk, hung on a nodding mountain flower, unfearful above the canon's emptiness. An occasional bird ventured a boldly questioning note that lingered unfinished in the silence of indecision. Across the road hopped a young rabbit, a little rounded shadow that melted into the ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... off. In the morning the red-skins would be prowling about, and they would be too glad to get us instead of the victim who had escaped them. We were not likely to find another Poccahuntas to save our lives. We went back the way we had come, obliterating as best we could all traces of our advance, and at last, after many hardships, we reached our canoe. We had our rifles, but our ammunition was growing short, and we had no means of replenishing it; the winter also was coming on, and ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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, there was nothing in the world that mattered but that. If Vivian would not ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... 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 ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... of forty. If I mistake not, the characteristics of his government will be impartiality and energy—not in making further changes, but,—in consolidating and maturing the new institutions which have been established amongst us—in obliterating past differences, in developing the latent resources of the country, and in raising up a ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... left it. Once in the burned herbage under the trees, he looked back to the road. There was rock and there was black leaf-mould. If in the latter any hoof-prints showed confusedly, the coming storm held promise of a pelting and obliterating rain. He pushed into a thick-set wood, and began a desperate ride across country. It was necessary to strike the ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... so well, as he thought, in securing Allan's friendship, and in obliterating all recollections of the former affront put on him, that he began to think it possible to employ him in executing his private revenge upon MacKinnon of Ulva, with whom, as was usual between such neighbours, he had some feud. With this purpose, he offered what he called the following ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... tempest's scourge Like serpents struggling in a vulture's grasp. 325 Calm and rejoicing in the fearful war Of wave ruining on wave, and blast on blast Descending, and black flood on whirlpool driven With dark obliterating course, he sate: As if their genii were the ministers 330 Appointed to conduct him to the light Of those beloved eyes, the Poet sate, Holding the steady helm. Evening came on, The beams of sunset hung their rainbow hues High 'mid the shifting domes of sheeted spray 335 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... last is 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 of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... river are able to see 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 ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... Mountain-men, they felt that nothing short of extermination would suffice. And they were right. Extermination of the sinners, or the sins, was indeed their only chance of peace! Not knowing the Gospel method of blotting out the latter, their one resource lay in obliterating the former. ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... universe; and in order to secure a return thither, it was only necessary to refine away the grossness of our material selves according to the doctrine of the Way. It thus came about that the One, in whose obliterating unity all seemingly opposed conditions were to be indistinguishably blended, began to be regarded as a fixed point of dazzling intellectual luminosity, in remote ether, around which circled for ever and ever, in the supremest glory of motion, the ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... when discussing reversion and prepotency, I was necessarily led to give many facts on crossing. In the present chapter I shall consider the part which crossing plays in two opposed directions,—firstly, in obliterating characters, and consequently in preventing the formation of new races; and secondly, in the modification of old races, or in the formation of new and intermediate races, by a combination of characters. I shall also show that certain characters are ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... all or most things Austrian!"—and produces Documentary Covenants of Philip II. with his Austrian Cousins; "to which Philip," said the Termagant, "we Bourbons surely, if you consider it, are Heir and Alter-Ego!" Is not, this a curious case of testamentary right; human greed obliterating personal identity itself? ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... steals sleep. Sleep like a white mist on the rotting paintings of cupids and gods on the ceiling; Sleep on the carven shields and knots at the foot of the bed, Oozing, blurring outlines, obliterating ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... seized the whole army, was succeeded by joy and alacrity. The soldiers were urgent to be led against the enemy, in the firm assurance (as they said) of being victorious under their new leader, and of obliterating the disgrace of former defeats. Xanthippus did not suffer their ardour to cool; and the sight of the enemy only inflamed it. When he had approached within little more than twelve hundred paces of them, he thought proper to call a council of war, in order to show respect to ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin |
