Obliterate Quotes

Murdered by a kind of fear that seeks to obliterate any evidence that the world is different from the way they want to see it, from the way they want to believe it to be. ~ Lana Wachowski

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals
that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government
that it is not a charter _for_ government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection _against_ the government. ~ Ayn Rand

I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness. ~ Allen Ginsberg

Sometimes only pain can obliterate pain. ~ Alma Katsu

The future should grow from the past, not obliterate it. ~ William Least Heat-Moon

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. ~ George Orwell

Now, when I read, I read not,
For interrupting tears
Obliterate the etchings
Too costly for repairs. ~ Emily Dickinson

We live in perilous times and at crossroads. On the one hand, we risk our extinction and that of our planet because of the devastating combination of ancient tribal habits and modern technologies that have the ability to obliterate every living being on the planet several times over. On the other hand, we also possess a nervous system through which the universe is becoming self-aware. More than ever, we have the means and insight to create a brave new world in which our current stage of survival of the fittest can evolve to one of survival of the wisest. The road we choose will determine our future. ~ Deepak Chopra

I stare at my freakish eyeball, gaze into the distorted pupil until it expands and fills the mirror, fills my brain and I'm rushing through vacuum. Wide awake and so far at such speed I flatten into a subatomic contrail. That grand cosmic maw, that eater of galaxies, possesses sufficient gravitational force to rend the fabric of space and time, to obliterate reality, and in I go, bursting into trillions of minute particles, quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed. Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand. Reduced to my "essential saltes" as it were, I'm the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the Ouroboros swallows itself and the cycle begins anew with a big bang. ~ Laird Barron

Jonathan's arm jerked to the side in clumsy reaction, tipping over the bottle of ink that sat on the desk beside his papers. He watched the dark liquid obliterate in a moment what had cost him an afternoon of painful effort to complete. It was a fitting metaphor for his life, he thought, like the despair that spread inexorably through his being, a creeping blackness that threatened to blot out what small hope or purpose was yet left to him. ~ Sondra Allan Carr

I destroy the image after I've made it, obliterate it a little so you never have it completely there. ~ Deborah Turbeville

Moments one knows only death will obliterate. ~ John Fowles

Hypothetically, then, you may be picking up in someone a certain very strange type of sadness that appears as a kind of disassociation from itself, maybe, Love-o.'
'I don't know disassociation.'
'Well, love, but you know the idiom "not yourself" - "He's not himself today," for example,' crooking and uncrooking fingers to form quotes on either side of what she says, which Mario adores. 'There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.'
'Engulf means obliterate.'
'I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is "existential," Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father's. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices - Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold ou ~ David Foster Wallace

You're going to obliterate me aren't you? ~ Jandy Nelson

If there's a cat, I obliterate it by putting polka dot stickers on it. I obliterate a horse by putting polka dot stickers on it. And I obliterated myself by putting the same polka dot stickers on myself. ~ Yayoi Kusama

That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off ... and still have no good idea why you were really fighting. ~ Iain Banks

The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, nor the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous universe in which they found themselves. What it did weaken, and finally obliterate, were the countless religions each of which claimed with unbelievable arrogance, that it was the sole repository of the truth and that its millions of rivals and predecessors were all mistaken. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

They all fear death, but they want to hurry and cast away the time remaining between now and the grave. 'I can't wait till this day's over,' they say. 'I wish this week would end,' they say. 'I can't wait until next month,' they say. All of life they will ever know lies in the present breath that they are granted. But they, who would think us crazy for throwing away socks, throw away everything in their rush to obliterate their lives and be devoured all the sooner by their greatest fear. The end and its grave-mold. Their beginning is their end: a brief, nervous twitch of panic and dread, and nothing more. ~ Nick Tosches

Hate is what will obliterate the brightest of the stars that shine inside your heart. ~ Victoria Moschou

I thought about him trying not to laugh at the 'Molahonkey Song' on a night when the snow drifted gold past the window. I thought about the warm skin and soft hair and hands of someone living, someone who was far cleverer and funnier than I would ever be and who still couldn't see a better future than to obliterate himself. And finally, my head pressed into the pillow, I cried, because my life suddenly seemed so much darker and more complicated than I could ever have imagined, and I wished I could go back, back to when my biggest worry was whether Frank and I had ordered in enough Chelsea buns. ~ Jojo Moyes

I don't think there's any single finished point for a work. It's done when something's happening with the work that feels like a balanced, coherent disharmony. That's one way to say it. And where if I keep working on it, to discover and struggle with new problems, I'll obliterate the ones I was working on. I could keep working on it, but it'd become something different. And I value what's here, at the moment. ~ Jessica Stockholder

Much of magic as I understand it in the Western occult tradition is the search for the Self, with a capital S. This is understood as being the Great Work, as being the gold the alchemists sought, as being the Will, the Soul, the thing we have inside us that is behind the intellect, the body, the dreams. The inner dynamo of us, if you like. Now this is the single most important thing that we can ever attain, the knowledge of our own Self. And yet there are a frightening amount of people who seem to have the urge not just to ignore the Self, but actually seem to have the urge to obliterate themselves. This is horrific, but you can almost understand the desire to simply wipe out that awareness, because it's too much of a responsibility to actually posses such a thing as a soul, such a precious thing. What if you break it? What if you lose it? Mightn't it be best to anesthetize it, to deaden it, to destroy it, to not have to live with the pain of struggling towards it and trying to keep it pure? I think that the way that people immerse themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in television, in any of the addictions that our culture throws up, can be seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves and the responsibility of accepting and owning a higher Self and then having to maintain it. ~ Alan Moore

Men who have found tbe right way of life do not seek to escape from awareness, to obliterate their consciousness, and to drug themselves out of existence. Drug addiction is the confession of an unbearable inner state. ~ Ayn Rand

I can choose the subroutine and perform sadness. How is that different from what you are doing, except that you use the word feelings and I use the word feelings, out of deference for your cultural memes which say: there is all the difference in the world. I erase the word even as I say it, obliterate it at the same time that I initiate it, because I must use some word yet this one offends you. I delete it, yet it remains. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. ~ Joan Didion

Bruno Bettelheim, a psychologist and educator at the University of Chicago, wrote one of the most perceptive articles about education in the aftermath of Sputnik. He observed that while liberal policymakers urged racial integration they simultaneously favored intellectual segregation. Writing in Commentary in 1958, he said that northern white liberals wanted to obliterate the color line while replacing it with a hierarchical caste system based on intelligence. The movement to the suburbs was one way to ensure that their own children had a leg up on everyone. But gifted programs (and the new Advanced Placement programs in high school) promised middle- and upper-class whites (and some blacks who made it out of poverty) greater access to the highest-quality education. Despite all the Jeffersonian talk about how talented inhered in all classes, the poor were unlikely to benefit from gifted programs or the new curriculum projects. A new caste system was in the making, parodied so brilliantly in Michael Young's 1958 fantasy, The Rise of the Meritocracy. Bettelheim sarcastically asked why elite liberals were so worried. "Have these so-called gifted been winding up in the coal mines, have so few of them managed to enter Harvard, Yale, City College, or the University of Chicago? ~ William J. Reese

It is hard to believe that many of those now exercising authority in the Church appears to have as their dearest ambition the obliteration of the most Sacred Prayer [1962 Latin Mass] from the face of the earth - and would it be too outrageous to suggest that where they do manage to obliterate the Sacred Prayer, the sacrifice which it enshrines may vanish too? ~ Michael Treharne Davies

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx. ~ James Baldwin

I don't think I've ever gotten any significant thing I wanted. You have no idea how weird it is to envision things and have them come to nothing. No vision has ever come true, no promise has ever been kept. But then there was you, and you were the promise that would obliterate all the disappointments of the past. Everything about you insisted on it. Your color, your hair, the way light projects from every part of you. You were the sun that would burn away all the putrid broken promises of the world. ~ Dave Eggers

In those days before the Great War when the events narrated in this book took place, it had not yet become a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When one of the living had been extinguished another did not at once take his place in order to obliterate him: there was a gap where he had been, and both close and distant witnesses of his demise fell silent whenever they became aware of his gap. When fire had eaten away a house from the row of others in a street, the burnt-out space remained long empty. Masons worked slowly and cautiously. Close neighbors and casual passers-by alike, when they saw the empty space, remembered the aspect and walls of the vanished house. That was how things were then. Everything that grew took its time in growing and everything that was destroyed took a long time to be forgotten. And everything that had once existed left its traces so that in those days people lived on memories, just as now they live by the capacity to forget quickly and completely. ~ Joseph Roth

Here is Senator Russell in a colloquy on the Senate floor with Senator Proxmire: There is something about preparing for destruction that causes men to be more careless in spending money than they would be if they were building for constructive purposes. Why that is so I do not know; but I have observed, over a period of almost thirty years in the Senate, that there is something about buying arms with which to kill, to destroy, to wipe out cities, and to obliterate great transportation systems which causes men not to reckon the dollar cost as closely as they do when they think about proper housing and the care of the health of human beings. ~ Paul A. Baran

Destroy such shining altars that spread bigotry - demolish such glorious churches and temples that proclaim divine supremacy - burn such glistening crucifixes, scriptures and idols that are used to preach weakness and segregation - obliterate every single trace of orthodoxy from the face of this planet, not with violence, but with awareness - and work - work to uplift the downtrodden - work to elevate the impoverished - work to raise those abandoned by fortune and opportunity - only then you shall have the rightful place under the sun as a holy human being. ~ Abhijit Naskar

What will you do with your self? Many men and women are still in darkness, trying to figure out the meaning and purpose of life. But no matter what you try to do with your self - whether you deny it, obliterate it, annihilate it, accept it or express it - believe me, it is still alive and kicking. ~ K.P. Yohannan

There are a million things in this world that can end you, that can in one second obliterate the life you work so hard to keep alive. Our lives are structured around not dying. Eating, sleeping, looking both ways before you cross the street. It's all, all of it, to keep us safe from the thing that we know is going to get us anyway. It doesn't even make sense, if you think about it. It's the world's biggest joke. Our entire lives are set up around not dying, knowing all the while that it's the one thing we can't avoid. ~ Rebecca Serle

Cruelty to dumb animals is one of the distinguishing vices of low and base minds. Wherever it is found, it is a certain mark of ignorance and meanness; a mark which all the external advantages of wealth, splendour, and nobility, cannot obliterate. It is consistent neither with learning nor true civility. ~ William Jones

If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, it is not merely because evil deeds may be performed in the name of patriotism, but because patriotic fervor can obliterate moral distinctions altogether. ~ Ralph Barton Perry

And somewhere from the dim ages of history the truth dawned upon Europe that the morrow would obliterate the plans of today. ~ Jaroslav Hasek

Death must obliterate all memories and affections and ideas and laws, or the awakening in the next world will be amid the welcomes, and loves and raptures of those who left us with tearful farewells, and with dying promises that they would wait to welcomes us when we should arrive. And so they do. Not sorrowfully, not anxiously, but lovingly, they wait to bid us welcome. ~ Randolph Sinks Foster

That's a claim I can put to you, Bishop." Dare knew the slow show of his teeth looked like pure evil. "I have contacts in businesses that you can't even imagine. I have friends in high places, and better friends in low places. No matter what you do or where you crawl away to, I have ways of getting to you. Cross me, and I will obliterate you, Bishop, socially, financially and personally. ~ Lori Foster

Forgetfulness is necessary to remembrance. Ideas are retained by renovation of that impression which time is always wearing away,and which new images are striving to obliterate. If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur, and every recurrence would reinstate them in their former place. ~ Samuel Johnson

God's heart is not to obliterate who we are and our culture, but to infiltrate every part of us and all areas of culture and align it with His love, which can transform and restore everything He created to the fullness of His original plan and purpose. ~ Shawn Bolz

I run. I am made for running. Because when you run, you could be anyone. You hone yourself into a body, nothing more or less than a body. You respond as a body, to the body. If you are racing to win, you have no thoughts but the body's thoughts, no goals but the body's goals. You obliterate yourself in the name of speed. You negate yourself in order to make it past the finish line. ~ David Levithan

We have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles. We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city, said Harry Truman. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war. It was to spare - ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Our culture encourages women to nurture men, making it predictable that many experience a seductive empathy for abusive men, as well as the misguided hope that love can obliterate an ugly past. ~ Leslie Morgan Steiner

For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that passion makes us believe we can overleap any walls, obliterate whatever obstacles. ~ Chang-rae Lee

Goods move in response to price differences from points of low to points of higher price, the movement tending to obliterate the price difference and come to rest. ~ Frank Knight

You ask me if I love you and what you really mean is will I devour you, envelope you, obliterate life for you and worse, will I allow you to do that to me. That's why I never answer you, because I do love you, but not in the way you want, and I never will. ~ Rona Jaffe

I wish to pay my debt. To give you the night I owe' ...
'Oh, Charlotte. You play with fire.'
'Do I?'
Roman looked at the woman in front of him, calm and collected, but there was heat there, such precious heat that was straining. Offering.
It took only one second for the words to form and emerge. 'Consider the debt of the night wiped free.'
He saw her blink. Stunned.
Watched the disappointment form. He felt nearly giddy as her disappointment form.
'What, but-'
'But what?' He smiled, loving the look on her face, even the desire that was slowly shuttering - for he would obliterate those shutters with his next words. 'You think I am freeing you? ... I am a selfish man.'
'A selfish man takes what is offered to him.' Was that doubt in her voice, doubt of her charms?
'No, a selfish man destroys what is offered to him and demands more. He demands everything. ~ Anne Mallory

In Japan itself there have all along been attempts by some to obliterate the article about renunciation of war from the Constitution and for this purpose they have taken every opportunity to make use of pressures from abroad. ~ Kenzaburo Oe

We could decide simply to remain absorbed in the mysterious, unformed, free-play of reality. This would be the choice of the mystic who seeks to extinguish himself in God or Nirvana - analogous perhaps to the tendency among artists to obliterate themselves with alcohol or opiates. But if we value our participation in a shared reality in which it makes sense to make sense, then such self-abnegation would deny a central element of our humanity: the need to speak and act, to share our experience with others. ~ Stephen Batchelor

He attempted to distract his thoughts from the events that were overwhelming him by going over his papers. These were the sum total of his literary output over the last fifteen years. In the early days he had harbored an inflated idea as to the merit of his work and had even enjoyed publication in magazines that nobody read. It was only later that he discovered he preferred to write for himself alone and not for the dubious pleasure of seeing his strange works in print. He liked to dream over them, writing only when inspiration came to him, which was infrequently, and the half-formed pieces and the false starts were either destroyed or subsumed into longer writings - of which there were few. He enjoyed destroying the work that did not satisfy him. Sometimes he even wondered if he actually wrote just so he could obliterate the results. ~ Mark Samuels

I know whom we must fight ... it is the Church. For all its history, it's tried to suppress and control every natural impulse.That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling. ~ Philip Pullman

Mahomet has been extolled by Moslem writers for the chastity of his early life ; and it is remarkable that, with all the plurality of wives indulged in by the Arabs, and which he permitted himself in subsequent years, and with all that constitutional fondness which he evinced for the sex, he remained single in his devotion to Cadijah to her dying day, never giving her a rival in his house, nor in his heart. Even the fresh and budding charms of Ayesha, which soon assumed such empire over him, could not obliterate the deep and mingled feeling of tenderness and gratitude for his early benefactress. Ayesha was piqued one day at hearing him indulge in these fond recollections : " O, apostle of God, " demanded the youth-ful beauty, "was not Cadijah stricken in years? Has not Allah given thee a better wife in her stead?" " Never ! " exclaimed Mahomet, with an honest burst of feeling - " never did God give me a better ! When I was poor, she enriched me ; when I was pronounced a liar, she believed in me ; when I was opposed by all the world, she remained true tome! ~ Washington Irving

I'm not him - that guy who was your boyfriend. That guy you want.He almost said: I wish I could be. He had wished he could be. That was why he had come to the Academy, to learn how to be that guy they all wanted back. He'd wanted to be that way, be an awesome hero like in a game or a movie. He'd been so sure, at first, that was what he wanted. Except wishing he could be that guy was like wishing to obliterate the guy he was now: the normal, happy guy in a band, who could still love his mother, who did not wake up in the coldest, darkest hour of the night weeping for dead friends. And he did not know if he could be that guy she wanted, whether he wished it or not. ~ Cassandra Clare

Never obliterate a man unthinkingly, the way an entire fief might do it through some due process of law. Always do it for an overriding purpose - and know your purpose! ~ Frank Herbert

I saw the Tracker - but that's wrong, really. I saw right to where the tracking thing was. I saw those winnowing tentacles come out again, and the front figure pause, and then - it's the only word that actually describes it - ooze on again on its via dolorosa. And at that the hind figure seemed to summon all its strength. It seemed to open out a fringe of arms or tentacles, a sort of corona of black rays spread out. It gaped with a full expansion, and even I could feel that there was a perfectly horrible attraction, or vacuum drag, being exerted. That was horrible enough, with the face of the super-suffering man now almost under me resonating my own terror. But the worst thing was that, as the tentacles unwrapped and winnowed out toward their prey, I saw they weren't really tentacles at all. They were spreading cracks, veins, fissures, rents of darkness expanding from a void, a gap of pure blackness. There's only one way to say it - one was seeing right through the solid world into a gap, an ultimate maelstrom. And from it was spreading out a - I can only call it so - a negative sunrise of black radiation that would deluge and obliterate everything. Of course it was still only a fissure, a vent, but one realized - This is a hole, a widening hole, that has been pierced in the dike that defends the common-sense, sensuous world. Through this vortex-hole that is rapidly opening, over this lip and brink, everything could slip, fall in, find no purchase, be swallowed up.

Gerald Heard

Caravaggio's art is made from darkness and light. His pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber, blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A man is assassinated on the high altar of a church. A woman is shot in the stomach with a bow and arrow at point-blank range. Caravaggio's images freeze time but also seem to hover on the brink of their own disappearance. Faces are brightly illuminated. Details emerge from darkness with such uncanny clarity that they might be hallucinations. Yet always the shadows encroach, the pools of blackness that threaten to obliterate all. Looking at his pictures is like looking at the world by flashes of lightning. ~ Andrew Graham-Dixon

Own me," I gasped. "Obliterate me. Make me feel like there's absolute nothing left but our bodies as they burn." He didn't answer me. He didn't have to. His fingers shoved inside me and started to dance in the way only Cole's ever could. ~ Ace Gray

Every time I make, I've made a piece of work, I've wanted to get rid of it, obliterate it and do the next thing, because it was never quite what I wanted. I think the moment you think you've arrived is the moment that you should stop. ~ Simon McBurney

Because you were foolish enough to love one place,
now you are homeless, an orphan
in a succession of shelters.
You did not prepare yourself sufficiently.
Before your eyes, two people were becoming old;
I could have told you two deaths were coming.
There has never been a parent
kept alive by a child's love.

Now, of course, it's too late –
you were trapped in the romance of fidelity.
You kept going back, clinging
to two people you hardly recognized
after what they'd endured.

If once you could have saved yourself,
now that time's past: you were obstinate, pathetically
blind to change. Now you have nothing:
for you, home is a cemetery.
I've seen you press your face against the granite markers –
you are the lichen, trying to grow there.
But you will not grow,
you will not let yourself
obliterate anything. ~ Louise Gluck

The European model is in danger if we obliterate the principle of personal responsibility. ~ Jacques Delors

Hamas says in its charter they want to see a world without Israel. They want to obliterate Israel. ~ Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

Necessity can obliterate our hatreds. ~ Daniel H. Wilson

Great joy doesn't obliterate grief. Both can be encompassed at the same time. ~ Helen Brown

You can't know how I dreaded appearing in school in those miserable poor box dresses. I was perfectly sure to be put down in a class next to the girl who first owned my dress, and she would whisper and giggle and point it out to the others. The bitterness of wearing your enemies cast-off clothes eats into your soul. If I wore silk stockings for the rest of my life, I don't believe I could obliterate the scar. ~ Jean Webster

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The disenfranchised offspring, along with an entire ageless class of human discards, know only that they are doomed. They are drawn to spikes and pentagrams, gasoline, guitars screaming like whips, MIDI-programmed Thanatos, with sufficient amplitude to occupy that hollow space where consciousness once resided. These Dionysians obliterate themselves by removing filters, ultimately becoming insensate with sensation. This mode of behaviour originates in the superstitious belief that transcendence is acquired in the precise ratio by which reason is destroyed. ~ Adam Parfrey

I thought about the warm skin and soft hair and hands of someone living, someone who was far cleverer and funnier than I would ever be and who still couldn't see a better future than to obliterate himself. ~ Jojo Moyes

Heavy investments in information technology have delivered disappointing results - largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanize old ways of doing business ... Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over. ~ Michael Martin Hammer

You're going to obliterate me, you know.
- Oscar Ralph to Jude Sweetwine ~ Jandy Nelson

I guess we believed, together, that the wrong voice can obliterate a landscape. ~ Anonymous

Every step in the progress of this study has tended to obliterate the technical barriers by which logicians have sought to separate the inquiries relating to the several parts of man's nature. ~ Richard Owen

Is there a brick wall getting in your way? Fine. That happens. But you have a choice. You can walk away from the wall. You can go over the wall. You can go under the wall. You can go around the wall. You can also obliterate the wall. In other words, don't let anything get in your way. Get a balance, and then let the positive outdistance the negative. ~ Donald Trump

It is well to have specifically holy places, and things, and days, for, without these focal points or reminders, the belief that all is holy and "big with God" will soon dwindle into a mere sentiment. But if these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. ~ C.S. Lewis

When the mind is kept away from its preoccupations, it becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and a love you have never known; and yet you recognise it at once as your own nature. Once you have passed through this experience, you will never be the same man again; the unruly mind may break its peace and obliterate its vision; but it is bound to return, provided the effort is sustained; until the day when all bonds are broken, delusions and attachments end and life becomes supremely concentrated in the present. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

There Albine lay, panting, exhausted by love, her hands clutched closer and closer to her heart, breathing her last. She parted her lips, seeking the kiss which should obliterate her, and then the hyacinths and tuberoses exhaled their incense, wrapping her in a final sigh, so profound that it drowned the chorus of roses, and in this culminating gasp of blossom, Albine was dead. ~ Emile Zola

He'd never experienced hate before. It was like an ulcer growing on a tumor, festering and stinking. Late at night or between dreams and sleep, he'd get into it, bathing in the venom, wallowing in thoughts of revenge. In a way, the hate felt good. You were righteous, godlike, the dispenser of justice. Hate dispelled your fears and forged every disappointment, setback, loss, humiliation, and failure that ever happened to you into one massive steel sledgehammer of rage, poised to obliterate, and for one brief, purifying moment, give you relief. ~ Joe Ide

Whoever has seen the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of one man, of that man's trivial fortunes or misfortunes, though he be that very man. That man has been he and now matters no more to him. What is the life of that other to him, the nation of that other to him, if he, now, is no one? This is why I do not pronounce the formula, why, lying here in the darkness, I let the days obliterate me. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. ~ Hannah Arendt

In dreams the images in the mind, in the subconscious, merge with and obliterate the perceptions from the astral senses, in a similar way that in daily life the subconscious causes the external world to be perceived with the colorations of thoughts, feelings, images, and emotions; in other words, we daydream or get lost in thoughts. ~ Belsebuub

The relationship between physics and war is clear: the ruler and the general want to threaten or obliterate targets; destruction requires energy; the physicist is the expert on matter, motion, and energy. It's the physicist who invents the bomb. But to destroy a target, you have to locate it precisely, identify it accurately, and track it as it moves. That's where astrophysics comes in. Neither protagonists nor accomplices, astrophysicists are accessories to war. We don't design the bombs. We don't make the bombs. We don't calculate the damage a bomb will wreak. Instead, we calculate how stars in our galaxy self-destruct through thermonuclear explosions – calculations that may prove helpful to those who do design and make thermonuclear bombs. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The memory of the pain did not destroy the reality of the pleasure; grief did not obliterate joy. ~ Orson Scott Card

That's what we do. Embellish. Decorate. Unvarnished truth has only limited appeal. Some events are a joy to recall, but others are best modified, even forgotten. They live in some lumber-room of the mind, housed somewhere you wouldn't want to go alone and never after dark. If I make a mistake in my work or if I change my mind, I can unpick. Undo what I've done. I can make good my errors and no one is the wiser. If they looked, even through a magnifying glass, all observers would see would be the tiny holes where my needle had travelled. I can erase even that evidence by scratching carefully at the weave of the lining with my needle, until the holes are no longer visible. But life isn't like that. Mistakes once made are rarely reversible. The holes they leave in the fabric of life aren't tiny and they can't be scratched away. You have to live with them as best you can. Work round them. That's why you have to come to terms with memory. You can't obliterate the past or eradicate it from the mind, even when, for our own good, memory enfolds us in a blanket of forgetfulness. There are always traces left, marks where time gripped us and left its telltale fingerprint. ~ Linda Gillard

Cool is a weapon created by creeps to obliterate the morals that good parents instill in their children. ~ Greg Gutfeld

Prior to the First Battle of Zion, it was commonly believed that aliens would be peaceful, rather than being just as violent as humanity. When the Zion Defense Force encountered alien starships emerging from a previously undiscovered Asimov Point in the Zion System, they allowed themselves to be suckered into a position that allowed the Snakes to obliterate the entire force with ease. ~ Christopher G. Nuttall

To explode or to implode - said Qwfwq - that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration and, by ingesting, cherish them. To steal away, to vanish; no more; to hold within oneself every gleam, every ray, deny oneself every vent, suffocating in the depths of the soul the conflicts that so idly trouble it, give them their quietus; to hide oneself, to obliterate oneself; perchance to awaken elsewhere, unchanged. ~ Italo Calvino

I was trying to cheat death. I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me. I was only to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone. ~ Cornell Woolrich

Comfort is not the objective in a visionary company. Indeed, visionary companies install powerful mechanisms to create /dis/comfort
to obliterate complacency
and thereby stimulate change and improvement /before/ the external world demands it. ~ James C. Collins

He's like a trip wire, rigged to detonate a category five hurricane of emotions inside of me. But I'm a masochist of the highest order, so I let him obliterate me. Again and again. ~ A. Zavarelli

Somewhere there is a check on their natural rate of increase, and you can be sure of one thing - that if they could tell us what they wanted at any one time, they would vote to obliterate the forces that hold them in check, the forces that ensure their long-term benefits. And so, probably, would we, if we voted merely on the basis of our individual interests. ~ Bernd Heinrich

The whole human earth was bleeding.
Time, buildings, routes, rain,
erase the constellation of the crime,
the fact is, this small planet
has been covered a thousand times by blood,
war or vengeance, ambush or battle,
people fell, they were devoured,
and later oblivion wiped clean
each square meter: sometimes
a vague, dishonest monument,
other times a clause in bronze,
and still later, conversations, births,
townships, and then oblivion.
What arts we have for extermination
and what science to obliterate memory!
What was bloody is covered with flowers.
Once more, young men, ready yourselves
for another chance to kill, to die again,
and to scatter flowers over the blood. ~ Pablo Neruda

Her temperament has never been competitive; she immediately wants to disappear, to obliterate herself, to make way for them. ~ Philippe Grimbert

The purpose of adolescence is to revise the past, not to obliterate it ... Adolescence entails the deployment of family passions to the passions and ideals that bind individuals to new family units, to their communities, to the species, to nature, to the cosmos. Therefore, given half a chance, the revolution at issue in adolescence becomes a revolution of transformation, not of annihilation. ~ Louise J. Kaplan

As if the parents we were born to weren't always a matter of happenstance: an elbow jostled at a bar, a muscular hand smoothing the hair away from a blue-shadowed eye, a quick decision that this girl looks hot or that guy seems safe. We are never guaranteed that the people who fit together so deliciously in the heat of a moment can building a lasting love. And it is love, the breadth and force of being wholly, unabashedly loved - not just having two parents who look like the wax figures on a wedding cake - that affirms and redeems us. Poverty alone doesn't always spark violence. And a two-parent home isn't always the antidote. The urge to obliterate is as dark and unknowable as the hollows of our bones. ~ Laura Bogart

Suppose aliens invade the earth and threaten to obliterate it in a year's time unless human beings can find the Ramsey number for red five and blue five. We could marshal the world's best minds and fastest computers, and within a year we could probably calculate the value. If the aliens demanded the Ramsey number for red six and blue six, however, we would have no choice but to launch a preemptive attack. ~ Paul Erdos

Thus the negro transmits the eternal mark of his ignominy to all his descendants; and although the law may abolish slavery, God alone can obliterate the traces of its existence. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

I am the maker of my own fortune, and Oh! that I could make that of my Red People, and of my country, as great as the conceptions of my mind, when I think of the spirit that rules the universe. I would not then come to Governor Harrison to ask him to tear up the treaty, and to obliterate the landmark, but I would say to him, "Sir, you have the liberty to return to your own country." ~ Tecumseh

(From FORTUNE'S SON)
Philip had long ago begun drinking to excess, simply to obliterate the reality that he was half a man, living half a life. He had a title without the fortune, a wife that was no lover, and a lover, the only light in his darkened existence, who could never be his wife; thus, he drank ... drink and despair had made him reckless and rash. He'd gambled and he'd lost. Sunk in self-denigration, the cycle began anew; he drank.
Though aspiring for oblivion, he had only achieved piss-faced, when Lady Hastings had arrived after the race. The inevitable row had ensued, and then the world had retracted into blessed blackness. ~ Emery Lee

All Heaven and Earth
Flowered white obliterate...
Snow...unceasing snow ~ Basho Matsuo

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky. ~ Anais Nin