Obliterate

I will take it unkindly if ever again you suggest by word or action that I am so stupid." Fear showed in the squinting of Rabban's eyes. He knew within certain limits how far the old Baron would go against family. Seldom to the point of death unless there were outrageous profit or provocation in it. But family punishments could be painful. "Forgive me, m'Lord Baron," Rabban said. He lowered his eyes as much to hide his own anger as to show subservience. "You do not fool me, Rabban," the Baron said. Rabban kept his eyes lowered, swallowed. "I make a point," the Baron said. "Never obliterate a man unthinkingly, the way an entire fief might do it through some due process of law.

The shock of grief can only partly obliterate Clara's lopsided temper.

They have wives, children, occupations, and interests, they have a background which is so strong that the war cannot obliterate it.

Hucheloup, one fine morning, had seen fit to notify passersby of this "specialty;" he had dipped a brush in a pot of black paint, and as he was an orthographer on his own account, as well as a cook after his own fashion, he had improvised on his wall this remarkable inscription:— Carpes ho gras One winter, the rainstorms and the showers had taken a fancy to obliterate the S which terminated the first word, and the G which began the third; this is what remained:— Carpe ho ras Time and rain assisting, a humble gastronomical announcement had become a profound piece of advice.

For I came to town still, like a friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad open fields were all piled up between the walls of the Walden road, and half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last traveller.

He wished as much as possible to obliterate the memory of the scenes that had taken place in Ireland and never alluded to them or suffered me to speak of my misfortunes.

It is what I tried to obliterate my crime.

He knew he had nothing to cover or obliterate that place—it left a barren crater in his heart.

We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city, said Harry Truman.

I was not discontented with this state of things, for it had seemed to me that discipline, or at least formal discipline, was a virtue of peace: a character or stamp by which to mark off soldiers from complete men, and obliterate the humanity of the individual.

But time began at last to obliterate the freshness of my alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow into a thing of course; I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.

"Italy then is condemned. We obliterate the whole peninsula," said Mr. Chillingford, with mild irony.

Even snails know That gods obliterate, And cures bring pain, That heaven is seen Through a door of flame.

Some of the older women in town — Mabel Werts, Glynis Mayberry, Audrey Hersey — remember that Larry McLeod found some charred papers in the upstairs fireplace, but none of them know that the papers were the accumulation of twelve years' correspondence between Hubert Marsten and an amusingly antique Austrian nobleman named Breichen, or that the correspondence of these two had commenced through the offices of a rather peculiar Boston book merchant who died an extremely nasty death in 1933, or that Hubie had burned each and every letter before hanging himself, feeding them to the fire one at a time, watching the flames blacken and char the thick, cream-colored paper and obliterate the elegant, spider-thin calligraphy.

That was how, thirty hours before my birth, my father demonstrated that he, too, longed for fictional ancestors ... how he came to invent a family pedigree that, in later years, when whisky had blurred the edges of his memory and djinn-bottles came to confuse him, would obliterate all traces of reality ... and how, to hammer his point home, he introduced into our lives the idea of the family curse.

Lever at last hit on a plan to cover, since he might not obliterate, the disgrace.