Erasing Quotes

(Peter) Easy to see in hindsight, but also easy to feel that, in another great city, on another continent, I was erasing her four years of unhappiness and setting her charmed life back on course. ~ Nancy Woodruff

There was something brittle about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would destroy her. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer's wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut is of meat; who were out not only in '75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never took to the way of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and plowing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already written for want of parchment. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Time is not so all-erasing as we think. ~ Constance Fenimore Woolson

I think we all wish we could erase some dark times in our lives. But all of life's experiences, bad and good make you who you are. Erasing any of life's experiences would be a great mistake. ~ Luis Miguel

No! Beauty is emotional! That's why plastic surgery never works. Women who want to change their nose, lips, they don't understand that they are doing nothing except erasing their magic. ~ Mario Testino

One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase "looking for life, destroying life," Then he explained, "It's an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies." I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world's errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the "erasing" of people, the "hiding away" of suffering. "My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember. ~ Tracy Kidder

You told me that a doctor used hypnotism to treat you, with the result that for a long time you lost the memory of your childhood and youth", he continued. "That is the characteristic - the stigma - of all those who have been 'bitten by the snake of the spiritual realm'. It seems almost as if, inside us, one life has to be grafted onto another, as a scion is grafted onto a wild tree, before the miracle of awakening can occur. The separation that usually comes with death is in our case achieved by erasing the memory, sometimes just by a sudden spiritual about-turn. ~ Gustav Meyrink

If you want to draw some advantage from your history, you must accept not only this miracle but also many others. In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out of loneliness receive caring teachers who are really the children themselves moved back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding lights to it to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

Perspective makes all the difference. It's not what you look at; it's what you see ... Remember that the sun never actually sets; it's our perspective that makes it appear to. Our sunset is another's sunrise. It's all perspective. How would your life be different if you applied this truth to the things that cause you stress? Letting go isn't about erasing the past; it's about looking at the same event and seeing something different. Activate this power in your life! Take the pain and poison of the past and allow it to nourish a new found wisdom. Remember, you can't change the past, but you can change the labels you place on events. Perspective - it's not what you look at; it's what you see. ~ Steve Maraboli

He wondered if anyone really ever changed, or if stuff just piled on and on, covering up, but never erasing all the different parts. How deep would you have to dig to find who you started out as? ~ Alex London

What makes us leave what we love best?
What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself
When we need it most,
That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake
And holds us flush there
until we begin to love it
And have to begin again?
What is it within our own lives we decline to live
Whenever we find it,
making our days unendurable,
And nights almost visionless?
I still don't know yet, but I do it. ~ Charles Wright

Look, Gray…a decent guy doesn't just get born and grow up to be Mr. Perfect. They need to be created by a woman. They're like a dumb blank lump of clay and you have to mold them into what you want them to be, while erasing everything their mothers ever taught them and all the horrible internet porn they've watched growing up."I laughed."I am so serious. Do not laugh. Do you realize that men actually think that porn is real? Like a girl is going to scream and thrash around like that for thirty minutes and all you have to do is be the pizza guy! The pizza guy, Grace…and they don't ever eat the pizza first! And let's not even talk about the fact that NO real girls look THAT good! It's like they all come from the planet Nocellulite-us. ~ Christine Zolendz

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again. ~ E.L. Doctorow

She's erasing me bit by bit and it's painfully obvious that no one can stop her. ~ J.M. Northup

Dear 2600: Tell me how much one of your hackers would charge me to delete my criminal record from the Texas police database.
[NAME DELETED] Well, we would start with erasing your latest crime, that of soliciting a minor to commit another crime. (Your request was read by a small child here in the office.) After you're all paid up on that, we will send out the bill for hiding your identity by not printing your real name, which you sent us like the meathead you apparently are. After that's all sorted, we can assemble our team of hackers, who sit around the office waiting for such lucrative opportunities as this to come along, and figure out even more ways to shake you down. It's what we do, after all. Just ask Fox News. ~ Emmanuel Goldstein

As to my mouth, of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother's lips, generous below and above; and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them, I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they'd melt into compliance, everyone of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done. But the fire didn't spare my lips; it took them too, erasing them utterly. ~ Clive Barker

Quitting Facebook would be like partially erasing myself. Quitting Twitter would constitute further erasure. Pretty soon, I'd be invisible. I was never on Instagram or Tumblr, which I guess means I never completely existed in the first place. ~ Meghan Daum

She closed her eyes and opened them a moment later, like she was erasing the conversation from her memory. ~ Lee Child

Uh, what are you doing?"
"Nothing much. Just erasing all of Calinda's good grades and replacing them with incompletes. Eventually, the administrators will figure out what happened, but I'm making it look like a computer error. Still, I imagine she'll get some nasty lectures from her profs and parents in the meantime. ~ Jennifer Estep

I used to think of work as a bad word. Back in the corporate world, work was something that prevented me from living, something that kept me from feeling satisfied or fulfilled or passionate. Even the word itself carried with it a negative connotation. Work - bluck! When I left the corporate world, I swore off the word altogether. Noun, verb, adjective - I avoided all of work's iterations. I no longer 'went to work,' so that was easy to remove from my vocabulary. In fact, I no longer 'worked' at all; instead I replaced the word with a more specific verb: I would 'write' or 'teach' or 'speak' or 'volunteer,' but I refused to 'work.' I no longer went to the gym to 'workout'; instead I 'exercised.' And I stopped wearing 'work clothes'; I chose instead to wear 'dress clothes.' And I avoided getting 'worked up,' preferring to call it 'stress' or 'anxiety.' And I didn't bring my car to the shop to get 'worked on,' deciding instead to have my vehicle 'repaired.' Hell, I even avoided 'handiwork' 92 and 'housework,' selecting their more banal alternatives. Suffice it to say, I wanted nothing to do with the word. I wanted it not only stricken from my lexicon, but from my memory, erasing every shred of the thing that kept me from pursuing my dream for over a decade. But after a year of that nonsense, I realized something: it wasn't the word that was bad; it was the meaning I gave to the word. It took removing the word from my everyday speech for a year to discover that it wasn't a bad w ~ Joshua Fields Millburn

I don't know when the boys
began to walk away with parts of myself
in their sticky hands; when loving
became a process of subtraction. Or why,
having given up what seems so much,
I'm willing to lose even more - erasing
all this body's known, relearning it with you. ~ Melissa Stein

The enormous spotlight that focused on King, combined with the construction of Rosa Parks as a saintly symbol, hid the women's long struggle in the dimly lit background, obscuring the origins of the MIA and erasing women from the movement. For decades, the Montgomery bus boycott has been told as a story triggered by Rosa Park's spontaneous refusal to give up her seat followed by the triumphant leadership of men like Fred Gray, Martin Luther King, Jr., E. D. Nixon, and Ralph Abernathy. While these men had a major impact on the emerging protest movement, it was black women's decade-long struggle against mistreatment and abuse by white bus drivers and police officers that launched the boycott. Without an appreciation for the particular predicaments of black women in the Jim Crow South, it is nearly impossible to understand why thousands of working-class and hundreds of middle-class black women chose to walk rather than ride the bus for 381 days. ~ Danielle L. McGuire

Battered by shifing currents and a cold, unrelenting wind, we sailed past deserted islands crowded with pines and a ghost tree growing staight out of the water, its gaunt trunk and scrawny branches raised heavenward like an outcast pleading for his life. Now, having reached the north shore, we were doggedly searching for the hidden rivulet that would take us into The Peak. We were trapped in muddy water barbed with grasses and covered with thick green algae, which broke apart in clumps, then, after we'd edged through, resealed, erasing all signs of our passing.

The wind had dissipated - strange, as it'd been so turbulent minutes ago out on the lake. Dense trees surrounded us, packed like hordes of stranded prisoners. There wasn't a single bird, not a scuttle through the branches, not a cry - as if everything alive had fled. ~ Marisha Pessl

Orthodoxy and orthopraxy are both important and are both things that Jesus spoke to, but I no longer believe that either of these things belongs in the center of our circles. I think that spot should be reserved for the exact representation of love: Jesus. By erasing my central pursuit of orthodoxy and orthopraxy and replacing it with Jesus, the essence of love, I realized that perhaps Jesus was inviting us to pursue something even better than right thinking or right doing: he was inviting us to pursue a heart that is constantly increasing in is capacity to love. ~ Benjamin L. Corey

Either you're the one erasing or you're the one being erased. ~ Jim Carrey

We all have an eraser incorporated within us, a delete key, but we forget how to use it. Ho'oponopono helps us to remember the power that we have to choose between erasing (letting go) or reacting, being happy or suffering. It is only a matter of choice in every moment of our lives. ~ Mabel Katz

Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown of Louis XIV, to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV? We scoff at M. de Vaublanc for erasing the N's from the bridge of Jena! What was it that he did? What are we doing? Bouvines belongs to us as well as Marengo. The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N's. That is our patrimony. To what purpose shall we diminish it? We must not deny our country in the past any more than in the present. Why not accept the whole of history? Why not love the whole of France?" It ~ Victor Hugo

To my complete and utter surprise, the writing on his door is gone.
Vanished.
"What happened?" I ask.
It takes him a second before he realizes what I'm asking. "I washed it off," he explains.
"You what?"
"I wasn't going to, but I didn't want the super to give me a hard time. Plus, I thought it might freak out some of my neighbors. You have to admit, death threats on doors can be pretty offensive, generally speaking. Not to mention the sheer fact that it made me look like a total asshole - like some old girlfriend was trying to get even."
"Did you take pictures at least?"
"Actually, no." He cringes. "That probably would've been a good idea."
"But Tray saw the writing, right?"
"Um . . ." He nibbles his lip, clearly reading my angst.
"You told me he was with you last night. You said you called him."
"I tried, but he didn't pick up, and I didn't want you to worry."
"So, you lied?" I snap.
"I didn't want you to worry," he repeats. "Please, don't be upset."
"How can I not be? We're talking about your life here. You can't go erasing evidence off your door. And you can't be lying to me, either. How am I supposed to help you if you don't tell me the truth?"
"Why are you helping me?" he asks, taking a step closer. "I mean, I'm grateful and all, and you know I love spending time with you, be it death-threat missions or pizza and a movie. It's just . . . what do you get out of it? What's this sudden interest in my ~ Laurie Faria Stolarz

Tell me, Peppone, what other talents do you have besides erasing undesirables?"
"I enjoy a fair bit of sneaking, sir. I also enjoy pilfering and killing as a professional courtesy."
"What a delightfully horrid urchin you are."
"Thank you, sir. ~ Michelle Franklin

...the task was not to choose but to accept, there being no obligation to choose between what was appropriate and what was inappropriate, only to accept that we are not obliged to do anything except to comprehend that the appropriateness of the one great universal process of thinking is not predicated on it being correct, for there was nothing to compare it with, nothing but its own beauty, and it was its beauty that gave us confidence in its truth - and this, said Korin, was what struck him as he walked those hundred furiously-thinking paces on the evening of his birthday: that is to say he understood the infinite significance of faith and was given a new insight into what the ancients had long known, that it was faith in its existence that had both created and maintained the world; the corollary of which was that it was the loss of his own faith that was now erasing it, the result of which realization being, he said, that he experienced a sudden, utterly numbing, quite awful feeling of abundance... ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

No matter what you tell me, no matter how legitimate your reasons, I can never just forget about you, I can never push the years we spent together out of my mind. I can't do it because it really happened, they are part of my life, and there is no way I can just erase them. That would be the same as erasing my own self. ~ Haruki Murakami

Being scared is normal. My technique for erasing it is facing it. Be afraid and brave. Be nervous and courageous. The first few minutes of being scared is your test to see if you're really serious about reaching a goal. Push through anxiety and come out victorious. Fear is just a test. Honor the feeling. Know it's there. Know it's temporary. Face it to erase it. ~ Chrisette Michele

Into this dark truth
which opens its cloak to shield us, dizzying, tidal;
opens its sad wings to shoo us away,
just to say yes,
let that fine rain fall on the threshold;
let it fall like wings beating, like a breaking-open.

As a messenger from far away,
drenched and burning with fever,
carries his dispatch here, carries the word.
But the patterns of the rain spread out
and won't let us hear, won't let us see
what happens. And that
is what comes up to us,
speaks to us
and grabs us by the shoulders,
what's shaking and shouting at us is the rain,
it's the horizon dissolving.

Now we shiver, we burn, facing that gateway,
facing that drawbridge no-one will drop.
No-one is going to listen.

This dark truth, this swaying lightness
like the whisper of endless bats,
all sensing their way,
all surging as one up the veins' living corridors, all trying
to flee the towers.

To say yes,
let that mist of rain fall against the threshold,
let it fall on the walls;

let it keep erasing them. ~ Coral Bracho

I'm an African woman, I suppose these thoughts torture me more than they do black American people, because it's like watching my own children trapped in a car that's sinking to the bottom of a lake and being impotent to save them'the black Americans have their own holocaust going on. You see the black man erasing black children from the landscape, you see black women desperately trying to get the black man's attention by wearing blonde hair and fake blue eyes, 500 years after he sold her and their children across the ocean. ~ Kola Boof

Writing is one of the easiest things: erasing is one of the hardest. ~ Yisroel Salanter

They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over. ~ Margot Lee Shetterly

Been lickin' peanut-butter spoons? Maybe I should call you butterfingers. It has a better ring than Hella Shella. - Tran
'Answer my question, Tran. Right now. Or I show you just what these fingers'
I wiggled my fingers under his nose
'can really do.' I took a step closer, erasing the distance between us. 'And let me tell you, emo boy, you are not going to like it. Let's just say, that peanut butter I ate, freshly made.' I licked my lips with care. 'I'm actually quite skilled when it comes to crushing nuts.' - Shella ~ Krista Alasti

That's what life consists of, I'm afraid: erasing and being erased. ~ Alejandro Zambra

Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made. ~ Camilla Gibb

It looks like bribery. I mean,there is every appearance that Hillary Clinton was bribed to grease the sale of, what, 20 percent of America's uranium production to
Russia, and then it was covered up by lying about a meeting with her home
with the principals, and by erasing e-mails. And I presume we might know
for sure whether there was or was not bribery if she hadn't wiped out
you know, out thousands of e-mails. ~ Jedediah Bila

I'm not that man anymore. No one can stay that way too long. That's why wars end and a later generation catches its breath looking forward and erasing what's behind. ~ Erri De Luca

This is a generational difference. This is the same woman who told me to request "twilight sleep" during delivery. (Twilight sleep is the memory-erasing pain medication that doctors gave women in the 1950s whenever they had to take a baby out or put a body snatcher in.) I ~ Tina Fey

Are you going to hand me over to him?"
"I haven't decided yet," I teased, and he smiled again, erasing his momentary seriousness. "So, where'd you get the suit?"
"Believe it or not, that lovely friend of yours, Willa," Loki said. "She brought me a whole slew of clothes last night. When I asked her why she was being so generous, she said it was out of fear that I would run around naked."
I smiled. "That does sound like something you would do. Why are you wearing all black, though? Didn't you know you were going to a wedding?"
"On the contrary," he said, doing his best to look unhappy. "I'm in mourning over the wedding."
"Oh, because it's too late?" I asked.
"No, Wendy, it's never too late." His voice was light, but his eyes were solemn.
"May I cut in?" the best man asked.
"No, you may not," Loki said. I'd started to move away from him, but he held fast.
"Loki," I said, and my eyes widened.
"I'm still dancing with her," Loki said, turning to look at him. "You can have her when I'm done."
"Loki," I said again, but he was already twirling me away. "You can't do that."
"I just did." He grinned. "Oh, Wendy, don't look so appalled. I'm already the rebel Prince of thine enemy. I can't do much more to tarnish my image."
"You can certainly tarnish mine," I pointed out.
"Never," Loki said, and it was his turn to look appalled. "I'm merely showing them how it's done."
He began spinning me around the dance floor i ~ Amanda Hocking

Relationships are as much a work of art as a drawing. It takes time. It takes a lot of erasing, smudging, and redoing. In the end, it's usually worth it. Sometimes, it's not. ~ R.K. Ryals

You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

I spent hours putting that cassette together. To me, making a tape is like writing a letter - there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one ... A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention, and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch ... oh, there are loads of rules. (pg. 88-9) ~ Nick Hornby

I'm erasing myself from the narrative. Let future historians wonder how Eliza reacted when you broke her heart. ~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

Scattered across the Roman Empire, it was only natural for the gospel writers to distance themselves from the Jewish independence movement by erasing, as much as possible, any hint of radicalism or violence, revolution or zealotry, from the story of Jesus, and to adapt Jesus's words and actions to the new political situation in which they found themselves. ~ Reza Aslan

I'm Perfect at Feelings,

so I have no problem telling you

why you cried over the third lost

metal or the mousetrap. I knew

that orgasms weren't your fault

and that feeling of keeping solid

in yourself but wanting an ecstatic

black hole was just bad beauty.



Certain loves were perfect

in the daytime and had every

right to express carnally behind

the copy machine and there are

no hard feelings for the boozy

sodomy and sorry XX daisy chain,

whenever it felt right for you.



And when the moment of soft

levitation with erasing hands

made you feel dirty, like

the main person to think up love

in the first place, I knew that.

It's okay, you're an innocent

with the brilliance of an animal

stuffing yourself sick on a kill.

Don't, don't feel like the runt alien

on my ship: I get you. I know

the dimensions of your wishing

and losing and don't think you

a glutton with petty beefs. But

even I, who know your triggers,



your emblematic sacs of sad fury,

I understand why the farthest fat trees

sliver down with your disappointment

and why the big sense of the world,

wrong before you, shrugs but

somewhere grasps your spinning,

stunning, alone. But you have me. ~ Brenda Shaughnessy

I finally managed to try to do away with myself, as neatly and concisely as possible. I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments, some work, my friendship with you, and some other artifacts intact, instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things. ~ Francesca Woodman

You stand a better chance of bringing pretend to life through the power of belief than you stand any chance of erasing what's real by refusing to believe. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Volnaka ... did a remarkable job of getting anyone drunk with alacrity. It also worked well as a combustible in lamps, as paint remover, was a marvelous antiseptic and was singularly effective at erasing any memory of ever having imbibed it ~ J.R. Hardesty

I shook my head back and forth as though I was a human etch-a-sketch, erasing the memory. ~ Nicole Gulla

Lord, I know You don't want me to live in fear, because fear doesn't come from You. You want me to trust You instead. When I see things that are happening in the world it makes me afraid of what could happen to me or the people close to me. Too often I am afraid of what people think, and I know that "The fear of man brings a snare, but whoever trusts in the LORD shall be safe" (Proverbs 29:25 NKJV). Thank You that Your perfect love casts out all fear. I open my heart and ask for a fresh flow of Your perfect love in me. Help me to stay close to You so I can always feel Your love flowing through me and erasing all fear (2 Timothy 1:7). Keep me protected and away from every frightening threat. I know that the closer I am to You, the farther fear is from me. In Jesus' name I pray. ~ Stormie O'martian

One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.
And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer's ancient green lawns.
Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground.
Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.
The rocket lay on the launching field, blowing out pink clouds of fire and oven heat. The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts. The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land.... ~ Ray Bradbury

Long before Eichmann's capture, Auerbach had conducted research on Operation 1005, the large-scale secret campaign to destroy evidence of the Final Solution by digging up the mass graves, pulverizing the bodies in specially adapted cement-mixer apparatuses, and erasing all traces of the atrocities. She also found two people who had participated as slave laborers in this effort.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 53 ~ Deborah E. Lipstadt

You have to refine your being. You have to go through all of the stages and steps of erasing yourself through service to others with purity, humility, integrity. ~ Frederick Lenz

While it is a convenient construct to divide hope into a cognitive and an affective component, the two are tightly coupled. Feelings and emotions mold logical thinking and eliberate decision making...True hope, then, is not initiated and sustained by completely erasing the emotions, like fear and anxiety, that are often its greatest obstacles. An equilibrium needs to be established, integrating the genuine threats and dangers that exist into the proposed strategies to subsume them. So when a person tells me that he doesn't want to know about the problems and risks, that he believes ignorance is necessary for bliss, I acknowledge that yes, yunbridled fear can shatter a fragile sense of hope. But I assert that he still needs to know a minimum amount of information about his diagnosis and the course of his problem; otherwise his hope is false, and false hope is an insubstantial foundation upon which to stand and weather the vicissitudes of difficult circumstances. It is only true hope that carries its companions, courage and resilience, through. False hope causes them to ultimately fall by the wayside as reality intervenes and overpowers illusion. ~ Jerome Groopman

To all the ships at sea, and all the ports of call. To my family and to all friends and strangers. This is a message, and a prayer. The message is that my travels taught me a great truth. I already had what everyone is searching for and few ever find. The one person in the world who I was born to love forever. A person, like me, of the outer banks and the blue Atlantic mystery. A person rich in simple treasures. Self-made. Self-taught. A harbor where I am forever home. And no wind, or trouble or even a little death can knock down this house. The prayer is that everyone in the world can know this kind of love and be healed by it. If my prayer is heard, there will be an erasing of all guilt and all regret and an end to all anger. Please, God. Amen. ~ Nicholas Sparks

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one. ~ Nick Hornby

returned to the typewriter, angrily erasing and correcting each mistake she'd made, desperately wishing she could as easily wipe out her mental image of the man in her carriage house. ~ Barbara Delinsky

The sea was cruel and selfish as human beings, and in its monstrous simplicity had no notion of complexities like pity, wounding, or remorse ... You could see yourself in it ... while the wind, the light, the swaying, the sound of the water on the hull worked the miracle of distancing, calming you until you didn't hurt anymore, erasing any pity, any wound, and any remorse. ~ Arturo Perez Reverte

And then we would sit and watch as the first hint of sunlight, a light tinge of day blue, would leak out of the eastern horizon, slowly erasing the stars. The day sky would spread wide and high, until the first ray of the sun made an appearance. The morning commuters began to animate the distant South Lake Tahoe roads. But craning your head back, you could see the day's blue darken halfway across the sky, and to the west, the night remained yet unconquered - pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky. To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, "Let there be light!" You. ~ Paul Kalanithi

Without peace there can be no prosperity for any people, rich or poor. And yet, there can be no peace without erasing the harshness of the growing contrast between the rich and the poor. ~ Indira Gandhi

The space Dorian enters is the antithesis of what he has left, warm brightness erasing the dark cold. A large open hall filled with firelight and books, dark wood beams and windows covered in frost. It smells of spiced wine and baking bread. It is comforting in a way that defies words. It feels like a hug, if a hug were a place. ~ Erin Morgenstern

Memory had a habit of erasing, leaving only the most necessary. ~ Daisy Johnson

It's hard to do nothing totally. Even just sitting here, like this, our bodies are churning, our minds are chattering. There's a whole commotion going on inside us."
"That's bad?" I said.
"It's bad if we want to know what's going on outside ourselves."
"Don't we have eyes and ears for that?"
She nodded. "They're okay most of the time. But sometimes they just get in the way. The earth is speaking to us, but we can't hear because of all the racket our senses are shaking. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then-maybe- the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper."
The sun was glowing orange now, clipping the mountains' purple crests.
"So how do I become this nothing?"
"I'm not sure,"she said "There's no one answer to that. You have to find your own way. Sometimes I try to erase myself. I imagine a big pink soft soap eraser, and it's going back and forth, back and forth, and it starts down at my toes, back and forth, back and forth, and there they go-poof!-my toes are gone. And then my feet. And then my ankles. But that's the easy part. The hard part is erasing my senses-my eyes,my ears,my nose, my tongue. And last to go is my brain. My thoughts, memories, all the voices inside my head. That's the hardest, erasing my thoughts." She chuckled faintly. "My pumpkin. And then, if I've done a good job, I'm erased. I'm gone. I'm nothing. And then the world is free to flow into me like water into and emp ~ Jerry Spinelli

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves. ~ Terry Eagleton

felt the warmth from my chest to my fingertips as she infected my blood. Every part of me vibrated. I had agreed to stay away from her. I'd made a trade. Vengeance in exchange for erasing her from my life. ~ C.D. Reiss

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation. ~ Marcel Proust

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it. ~ Margaret Atwood

Because how dare we write our own stories, in our own voices?' CaZZ answers.

'True that,' Tanya says.

'Banning our books would be their way of erasing us, of making us - and the world we live in - invisible,' CaZZ says. ~ R. Zamora Linmark

+
He wasn't much for erasing anyway. Sometimes your mistakes showed you the really interesting connections between your brain, your hand, and your heart, the ones you might otherwise never know were there. They were important even if you had no idea what they meant.
Like now, for instance. Coming back here might be the biggest mistake he'd ever made. But it might also be the most important thing he'd ever done. ~ Poppy Z. Brite

My murdered poets drew from deep wells, even if they were presently hidden from me. They spoke the same words as the monks, as the Conquistadores, as our Dictator General, but coaxed a language anew from the charred bones they'd been tossed. I had taken comfort that we had been lying for millennia, erasing whole races of writers, executing texts with aplomb. It wasn't new. And someone had always been pressing hidden words from quill to parchment backed by stone. Whispering them into someone's ear. Even if the parchment was burned and the hand chopped off and thrown into the same fire, the stone remained. Only there were the words legible. ~ Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

And in those moments, Park thought about pulling back from her.
Not breaking up with her. That phrase didn't even seem to apply here. Just ... erasing away. Recovering the six inches between them ~ Rainbow Rowell

With pencil there is a tendency to be timid, either using very faint lines or erasing bad lines ... Line sketching tends to emphasize the structure of a drawing rather than the nuances of media.. ~ Paul Laseau

Tell me what to do."
His warm breath tickled my ear. "Relax."
"Please, Noah, I don't want to do this wrong. Tell me how to make you feel good."
He shifted so that his body rested beside mine, his leg and arm still draped over me. I felt small under his warmth and strength. His chocolate-brown eyes softened. "Being with you feels good. Touching you-"he tucked a curl behind my ear"-feels good. I have never wanted anyone like I want you. There's nothing you can do wrong when just breathing makes everything right."
His hand framed my face and his tone was edget with husky authority. "I want you, but only if you want me."
I kissed him back, allowing my arms to wrap around him. His fingers gently massaged my neck, releasing the tension, erasing my unease. The kiss became a drug and i craved more with every touch. Our bodies twined so tightly to one another, i had no idea where i began and he ended.
Noah felt strong and warm and muscular and safe and he smelled, oh, God, delicious. I couldn't stop kissing him if my life depend it upon it: his lips, his neck, his chest, and Noah seemed as hungry as me. We rolled and we touched and we shed unwanted clothes. I moaned and he moaned and my mind and soul and body stood on the edge of pure ecstasy.
And i waited. I waited for that moment of pausing for protection and the burning pain my friends described, but Noah never stopped and the pain never came, not even when i whispered his name and praise God ~ Katie McGarry

I find, the fancier the fashion magazine is, the worse the Photoshop. It's as if they are already so disgusted that a human has to be in the clothes, they can't stop erasing human features. ~ Tina Fey

kicked off my flip-flops and dug my feet into the sand. It was what we did in the Lowcountry when we found ourselves alone on the beach. We would sit, stare at the water, kick off our shoes, and dig our feet into the sand to stay cool. With the ocean rolling all around me, I could look at life from different angles. The sky gradually gave up its blanket of deep gray to pale blue with golden edges of light, erasing the last traces of night. And over the next half hour or so, the sky would become brilliant blue again. The water changed from deep steel to sparkling navy as the morning sun climbed into position and another day began. On ~ Dorothea Benton Frank

It was the first time I could actually understand the seduction and the allure of baring your throat to a predator. It had always seemed like madness to me, or the result of reading too many novels. It still did. But there was the barest sway of my body toward him.
His hair swung out to briefly curtain our faces. There was something in his expression that I couldn't entirely decipher.
And then he stepped back abruptly, his familiar smirk erasing that mysterious warmth I'd glimpsed.
Chloe was the first break the silence. She let out a shaky breath.
"Is it suddenly hot out here, or what?"
"Chapter 10 ~ Alyxandra Harvey

It goes on and on and on and eventually completely consumes my mind, blocking out memories and hopes of tomorrow, erasing everything but the present, which I begin to believe will never change. There ~ Suzanne Collins

This wobbly world
host to insects and lint
and a thousand pithy ways
to feel unserious each minute
It brings about
a great softening of the mind, like
the clouded edges of sea glass (this
filter you could download and apply)
A poultice or an opiate,
rigidly individual. Alone
and erasing sentences to splinters.
(Poem No. 5) ~ Erin J. Watson

Domestic

Where's the wisdom in erasing a loved one's mess,
so akin to his signature? Your honor, I only meant
to strew the immaculate in his wake. To wipe the path
ahead and behind reasonably clean. Futile, yes,
but weren't such gestures essential to love's discipline
once upon a time? Daily, I harvested dropped fruit peels
and socks. I chased him through life with dustpan
and broom, smoothed his body dents from the bed,
soothed the mud tramped floors. Did I sin in this?
Better to leave the habitat sweetly reeking of him
than to spend years scrubbing up evidence of his existence.
Archaelogists centuries hence may marvel at such relics:
his mustard stained napkins, toothpicks chewed
to splinters. Never let it be said that in my zeal
to clean I robbed the future's museums. Who
am I to call what flies to either side of the trail
he blazes--half read magazines, cups of scummed
over coffee and mashed out cigarettes--dirt? ~ Amy Gerstler

So long as globalization was slow in coming, everyone hoped and prayed that it would come soon. The unity of the world's nations was one of the great triumphalist themes of modernism. World's fairs were staged in its honor, one after another. Now that globalization is here, however, it arouses more anxiety than pride. The erasing of differences may not portend the era of universal reconciliation that everyone confidently expected. ~ Rene Girard

Things like "Everything happens for a reason" and "You'll become a stronger/kinder/more compassionate person because of this" brings out rage in grieving people. Nothing makes a person angrier than when they know they're being insulted but can't figure out how.
It's not just erasing your current pain that makes words of comfort land so badly. There's a hidden subtext in those statements about becoming a better, kinder, and more compassionate because of your loss, that often-used phrase about knowing what's "truly important in life" now that you've learned how quickly life can change.
The unspoken second half of the sentence in this case says you needed this somehow. It says that you weren't aware of what was important in life before this happened. It says that you weren't kind, compassionate, or aware enough in your life before this happened. That you needed this experience in order to develop or grow, that you needed this lesson in order to step into your "true path" in life.
As though loss and hardship were the only ways to grow as a human being. As though pain were the only doorway to a better, deeper life, the only way to be truly compassionate and kind. ~ Megan Devine

ust suppose that Hitler had won the war, wiped out all the Jews and convinced his people that there really was such a thing as a master race. The history books start to be changed, and, a hundred years later, his succesors manage to wipe out all the Indians. Three hundred years later and the Blacks have been eliminated too. It takes five hundred years, but, finally, the all powerful war machine succeeds in erasing the oriental race from the face of the earth as well. The history books speak of remote battles waged against barbarians, but no one reads too closely. because it's of no importance.
Two thousand years later after the birth of Narzism, in a bar in Tokyo, a city that has been inhabited for five centuries now by tall, blue eyed people, Hanz and Fritz are enjoying a beer. At one point, Hans looks as Fritz and asks "Fritz do you think it was always like this?"
"What?" asks Fritz
"The world"
"Of course the world was always like this isn't that what we were taught?"
"Of course I dont know what made me ask such a stupid question," says hans. They finish their beer, talk about other things and forget the question entirely. ~ Paulo Coelho

In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story - 'The Memory Erasers'. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon