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irrevocable
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  • These forks in the road can happen so fast for young boys; within months or even weeks, their journeys can take a decisive and possible irrevocable turn.†   (source)
  • He had loathed Snape from their first encounter, but Snape had placed himself forever and irrevocably beyond the possibility of Harry's forgiveness by his attitude toward Sirius.†   (source)
  • As if a great river of machinery is steaming slowly, irrevocably, toward her.†   (source)
  • I knew at exactly what point their faces would fall when my seemingly simple and childlike strategy would reveal itself as a devastating and irrevocable course.†   (source)
  • Time loops merely delay the inevitable, and the price we pay for using them is hefty—an irrevocable divorce from the ongoing present.†   (source)
  • But he'd gone too long without saying anything since the first time he cursed at her, and now it was all just irrevocably weird.†   (source)
  • "All I wanted to say," bellowed the computer, "is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything."†   (source)
  • Looking back, I realize that this period of my life has irrevocably come to a close; my happy-go-lucky, carefree schooldays are gone forever.†   (source)
  • What had happened, I knew, was irrevocable, yet at the same time it seemed there had to be some way I could go back to the rainy street and make it all happen differently.†   (source)
  • So, of course, every word was immediately, irrevocably branded into my brain.†   (source)
  • For better and worse, over the past two decades the economy and culture of the Khumbu has become increasingly and irrevocably tied to the seasonal influx of trekkers and climbers, some 15,000 of whom visit the region annually.†   (source)
  • She's always said that when sovereignty is vested in a single person whose right to rule is hereditary, the principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community are irrevocably lost.†   (source)
  • It would be comforting to think that it was because we were getting used to it, or that we were both growing up, but as I sat on the plane, I knew that something irrevocable had changed between us.†   (source)
  • The time-debt was irrevocable.†   (source)
  • And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.†   (source)
  • The two communities, the warriors and the general mountain populace, are irrevocably bound together.†   (source)
  • "In each firm was a man with a fixed irrevocable purpose in life, for the sake of which he would bend or sacrifice all else," Sullivan wrote.†   (source)
  • Annie was losing her hold on something very central about herself; she felt volatile, capable of rash and irrevocable acts.†   (source)
  • "By speaking English you implicitly and irrevocably agree for all our future conversation to take place in the English language," he says.†   (source)
  • His life has changed irrevocably, too.†   (source)
  • In the last thirty minutes, Josh's carefully ordered world had shifted and altered irrevocably.†   (source)
  • I was aware of being torn irrevocably from everything that had made up my life until now.†   (source)
  • I can't expect Nathaniel to get a better deal than he's already got at Lamp, and this is a reminder that his privileges are not irrevocable.†   (source)
  • But when the letter revealed his true identity, his sinister past, his inconceivable powers of deception, he felt that something definitive and irrevocable had occurred in his life.†   (source)
  • To begin, we'll have an irrevocable directorship in the CHOAM Company.†   (source)
  • Outdoors was the end of something, an irrevocable, physical fact, defining and complementing our metaphysical condition.†   (source)
  • But it was enough to irrevocably cross a boundary.†   (source)
  • What we don't know is whether their plans were complete and irrevocable or if they went ahead almost on whim … "Is it time yet?" she asked in the darkness.†   (source)
  • More than empathy, he felt he understood Sloan, that he had isolated the core elements of Sloan's personality, those things one could not remove without irrevocably changing the man.†   (source)
  • And then suddenly the knowledge was hers, irrevocable, searing: all those years of silence, when he would not speak of their lost daughter, David had been keeping this record of her absence.†   (source)
  • That volcano could already be rumbling, magma bubbling up, pressure building to an inevitable, irrevocable burst.†   (source)
  • I cried for what I had gained, the knowledge of Eden, irrevocably learned.†   (source)
  • Charys and Eledir had trusted Nemo and Nemo had trusted Jack, and the line had been irrevocably moved.†   (source)
  • The case had made a last, irrevocable turn.†   (source)
  • He didn't try to talk me out of it, because he recognized the tone that creeps into my voice when I've made an irrevocable decision.†   (source)
  • They knew that it was within the power of the father to curse his sons, and ay! a curse laid on a disobedient son or daughter was irrevocable.†   (source)
  • THE LAST FORTY-EIGHT hours had irrevocably altered Hema's life.†   (source)
  • She felt herself irrevocably drawn to it, like blood to the heart.†   (source)
  • Her son was still irrevocably gone—he would not eventually recover, like people in a coma—but thanks to the respirator, his heart was still beating.†   (source)
  • And I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction.†   (source)
  • Cut off irrevocably any chance of good coming from what they had done.†   (source)
  • But that bit, that fraction, was irrevocable.†   (source)
  • Rather, he insisted, now was not the time for so dangerous and irrevocable a decision.†   (source)
  • And surely the poor man looked mortified the next day, afraid that he had irrevocably offended me.†   (source)
  • Too much booze would irrevocably blur his memories, however, and his memories were sacred to him.†   (source)
  • He struggled for breath as his thoughts circled like birds that couldn't find a perch, searching for a way to change the truth, to change the queen of Attolia, but her decision was final, the action irrevocable.†   (source)
  • But to convict a human being of that practice was a verdict of irrevocable damnation, and he knew that he would not believe it of anyone, so long as the possibility of a doubt remained.†   (source)
  • This woman was in love with him, was one step away from being irrevocably committed to him.†   (source)
  • As I walked toward the locker room, I thought about how I feared things being irrevocably finished.†   (source)
  • I'm more certain than ever that I'm totally and irrevocably and hopelessly in love.†   (source)
  • But the race would be made alone; that decision was irrevocable.†   (source)
  • The sight of the land gliding by and slipping off to the south comforted the prisoners as if everything they saw were being added irrevocably to their accounts.†   (source)
  • Likewise, a Georgia lieutenant wrote to his wife from the trenches on the Chattahoochee that if Atlanta and Richmond fell, "we are irrevocably lost and not only will the negroes be free but …. we will all be on a common level….†   (source)
  • A wooden clock on the wall behind his head ticks away loudly, and it is relaxing to lie here with this placid man beside him, talking of anger and of change, without being irrevocably committed to it.†   (source)
  • Why not amend it and make it perfect before it is irrevocably established?†   (source)
  • Perhaps the earth was irrevocably broken.†   (source)
  • Don't know about the plagues or reject the information and it's an automatic and irrevocable death penalty.†   (source)
  • That it has an effective radius of a hundred yards and drives anyone unlucky enough to see it down forever into the darkened oubliette, among the terrible shapes, and secures the hatch irrevocably above them?†   (source)
  • I also saw that at his age and position he was the true prisoner of McGraw-Hill, irrevocably committed to its pettifoggery and its mean-spirited style and its single-minded concern for pelf—a man who could never again turn back—while I, at least, had the freedom of the world spread out before me.†   (source)
  • He felt that if once he went beyond the crown of the pass and took one step veritably down into the land of Mordor, that step would be irrevocable.†   (source)
  • But both our skulls were built of calcium, a sea product chosen in our earlier days and irrevocably part of us now; both were housings for large brains, similar, yet different; both seemed to contain a center of consciousness, awareness, sensitivity, with all the concomitant pleasures, woes, and available varieties of conclusions concerning existence which that entailed, passing at some time or other within these small, rigid pieces of carbonate of lime.†   (source)
  • The will to live drained irrevocably away.†   (source)
  • When they put us out an hour later, my life had been irrevocably changed.†   (source)
  • Or had he made some dreadful, irrevocable decision and was he unwilling to remain alone with it and anxious to delay its execution by chatting with the doctor and staying in his company?†   (source)
  • He awoke on this birthday morning with the feeling that there was menace in the air around him? that something irrevocable had occurred in him.†   (source)
  • The transfer was irrevocable.†   (source)
  • He was one of those rare World-Shakers whose compulsions might have torn down our society and irrevocably committed us to his own psychotic pattern.†   (source)
  • A summer-day river going somewhere, murmuring and irrevocable.†   (source)
  • She needed to think of Dick, the man to whom she was irrevocably married, as a person on his own account, a success from his own efforts.†   (source)
  • The silence that followed lay on them with the weight of things final and irrevocable.   (source)
  • But perhaps something had changed irrevocably.†   (source)
  • I know she felt her loss had smashed her life irrevocably, though she would try to put it together.†   (source)
  • And that was that: fast as Martin, and just as irrevocable.†   (source)
  • But once begun, the process is irrevocable.†   (source)
  • I knew things had already changed, irrevocably and totally.†   (source)
  • But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began.†   (source)
  • "Thursday," Archie said, a command in his voice, no nonsense, final, irrevocable.†   (source)
  • There was no real anger and nothing irrevocable was said.†   (source)
  • In listening to their wishes, Harris Presser irrevocably sealed his fate.†   (source)
  • This action is irrevocable and I am doing it in the best interest of the school and yourself.†   (source)
  • 1 "Accept the irrevocable fact that your life depends upon your mind.†   (source)
  • They held each other there a moment, separated, yet irrevocably joined.†   (source)
  • I knew him well enough to have seen his madness fuse irrevocably with the spirit of war.†   (source)
  • But how did it go from potential to real, incontrovertible, irrevocable?†   (source)
  • I had made an irrevocable tactical error and regretted it as soon as I had spoken.†   (source)
  • The planter, keeper and harvester of the wheat was irrevocably tied to the land.†   (source)
  • There was a sense both of power and of suffering in rendering such irrevocably final decisions.†   (source)
  • They had had more reason than most sisters to disavow their relationship, yet they had been fiercely loyal, had remained irrevocably bound to each other by grudges, debt, and love.†   (source)
  • So that little by little they swallowed their opposition as it became clear that the marriage was irrevocable.†   (source)
  • Any movement on your part constitutes an implicit and irrevocable acceptance of such risk," the first MetaCop says.†   (source)
  • And, finally, his father told him that Adam Farmer had come into being a long time before, when the reporter who was Anthony Delmonte—and would someday be David Farmer—had uncovered certain documents, obtained certain information at the State House in Albany, information that would change a lot of lives irrevocably ….†   (source)
  • Though we may deplore and condemn such actions from a humane point of view, we still have to acknowledge their unconditional, relentless and irrevocable nature.†   (source)
  • She interpreted this as a heroic determination to struggle without quarter against the ravages of time, but he was more specific: he had made the irrevocable decision to take his own life when he was seventy years old.†   (source)
  • She was dead, irrevocably dead, the knowledge irrefutable as he lay on the pavement now, his own strange flight ended somehow—he didn't know how, he didn't know when he had stopped moving in the air—and he continued to stare at her, unable to move, unable to talk, unable to do anything, and he felt all wet and oozy as if he were lying in a swamp, and he was aware of something warm and wet encompassing him as he looked at his mother, her head at that wrong angle, a rag doll tossed away.†   (source)
  • And then the SEALs linked arms with my family and my friends and my neighbors, people who they might never see again but to whom they were now irrevocably joined for all the days of their lives.†   (source)
  • The act was an exorcism of relief for Florentino Ariza, for when he put the violin back into its case and walked down the dead streets without looking back, he no longer felt that he was leaving the next morning but that he had gone away many years before with the irrevocable determination never to return.†   (source)
  • And then he was gone, leaving her with the certainty that whatever the consequences, her life had already been irrevocably altered in ways she'd never imagined possible.†   (source)
  • I thought such things were irrevocable.†   (source)
  • He himself, facing a firing squad, would not understand too well the concatenation of the series of subtle but irrevocable accidents that brought him to that point.†   (source)
  • Irrevocably.†   (source)
  • If it weren't Edward out there, if I didn't know in every cell of my body that he loved me as much as I loved him—unconditionally and irrevocably and, to be honest, irrationally—I'd never be able to get up off this floor.†   (source)
  • Whatever place I held in Mia's life, in Mia's heart, was irrevocably altered that day in the hospital three and a half years ago.†   (source)
  • She was an innocent bystander; with my words, she would be irrevocably trapped between her love for Miles Ryan and her love for me.†   (source)
  • His own central task was to convince the Dutch that America would accept no outcome short of complete, irrevocable independence.†   (source)
  • The outsiders, of course, thought that Remedios the Beauty had finally succumbed to her irrevocable fate of a queen bee and that her family was trying to save her honor with that tale of levitation.†   (source)
  • It's never something huge that changes everything, but instead the tiniest of details, irrevocably tweaking the balance of the universe while you're busy focusing on the big picture.†   (source)
  • In just a few short days, the world—two worlds, in fact—had been irrevocably altered, and as High King of the Silver Throne of Paralon, it was now his duty to see that the changes benefitted the peoples of a hundred lands, even those peoples who did not claim him as king, or support his rule.†   (source)
  • He understood that his future had been irrevocably altered, and while she wished she could shield him from this new reality, she knew she couldn't.†   (source)
  • He glanced left and right three times, unable to grasp that the soldiers were finally, blessedly, irrevocably dead.†   (source)
  • She spoke aloud to Stone now, to the room, to God, and to the twins whose lives, if they survived, might be irrevocably affected by this decision: "They could have seizures the minute I cut this.†   (source)
  • I tried to speak, to answer, but something heavy moved again, and I was understanding something fully and trying again to answer but seemed to sink to the center of a lake of heavy water and pause, transfixed and numb with the sense that I had lost irrevocably an important victory.†   (source)
  • Cratzchbarken points out that both events were driven home to the citizenry by mass media, and both events have almost shouted the frightening fact that, while something had ended, something else had been irrevocably set in motion, for good or ill.†   (source)
  • When Eragon touches her, a silvery mark appears on his palm, and an irrevocable bond is forged between their minds, making Eragon one of the legendary Dragon Riders.†   (source)
  • Her laugh had taken on the tones of an organ, her breasts had succumbed to the tedium of endless caressing, her stomach and her thighs had been the victims of her irrevocable fate as a shared woman, but her heart grew old without bitterness.†   (source)
  • He sat slouched casually on the arm of a chair, leaning forward, his forearm across his knees, his hand hanging down idlyand it was the faint smile on his face that gave to his words the deadly sound of the irrevocable: "Why should this seem so startling?†   (source)
  • It staggers both imagination and belief to advance the hypothesis that Mrs. Margaret White did not know she was pregnant, or even understand what the word entails, and recent scholars such as J. W. Bankson and George Fielding have made a more reasonable case for the hypothesis that the concept, linked irrevocably in her mind with the "sin" of intercourse, had been blocked entirely from her mind.†   (source)
  • And he didn't want to wonder, though he stared at himself as an artist stares at his subject, if he saw a man who'd already taken one irrevocable step toward change.†   (source)
  • Since the beginning of adolescence, when he had begun to be aware of his premonitions, he thought that death would be announced with a definite, unequivocal, irrevocable signal, but there were only a few hours left before he would die and the signal had not come.†   (source)
  • For one instant, while he felt the muscles of his face cracking into the fraud of a smile, he felt a formless, an almost supernatural terror, as if he sensed again the silent working of some smooth machine, as if he were caught in it, part of it and doing its irrevocable will.†   (source)
  • But the visitor was aware of his falseness, He felt himself forgotten, not with the irremediable forgetfulness of the heart, but with a different kind of forgetfulness, which was more cruel and irrevocable and which he knew very well because it was the forgetfulness of death.†   (source)
  • …between a law of nature and a bureaucrat's directive, that a hungry man is not free, that man must be released from the tyranny of food, shelter and clothing-all of it, for years, that the day might come when Nat Taggart, the realist, would be asked to consider the will of Cuffy Meigs as a fact of nature, irrevocable and absolute like steel, rails and gravitation, to accept the Meigs made world as an objective, unchangeable reality-then to continue producing abundance in that world.†   (source)
  • The power of his presence was such that from the first time he was seen in the church everybody took it for granted that a silent and tense duel had been established between him and Remedios the Beauty, a secret pact, an irrevocable challenge that would end not only in love but also in death.†   (source)
  • Visitacion did not recognize him when she opened the door and she thought he had come with the idea of selling something, unaware that nothing could be sold in a town that was sinking irrevocably into the quick-sand of forgetfulness.†   (source)
  • At first she thought it was a matter of a passing debility and she secretly took marrow syrup and put honey on her eyes, but quite soon she began to realize that she was irrevocably sinking into the darkness, to a point where she never had a clear notion of the invention of the electric light, for when they put in the first bulbs she was only able to perceive the glow.†   (source)
  • The search was a failure because I did not and could not know how irrevocably my ideas about education, those sacred and pontifical utterances, would be battered, bullied, disproven, and changed.†   (source)
  • He would pay it, mocking them the while, laughing though his mouth was filled with the blood of his body, and as he died he would pronounce an irrevocable curse which would come to pass.†   (source)
  • It is irrevocable, as the voice of the masses that determine it.†   (source)
  • My irrevocable determination could wait.†   (source)
  • They fixed themselves, and fixed irrevocably.†   (source)
  • It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality.†   (source)
  • … He understood it now, understood it all, irrevocably, indelibly.†   (source)
  • In fact, the patient's death had been ordained irrevocably.†   (source)
  • She laughed—almost happily—thinking of the lost and irrevocable years.†   (source)
  • Lives not only divorced from, but irrevocably excommunicated from, all reality.†   (source)
  • Something irrevocable has happened.†   (source)
  • When she had signed the papers and the mills were irrevocably gone and Melanie was passing small glasses of wine to Ashley and Rhett to celebrate the transaction, Scarlett felt bereft, as though she had sold one of her children.†   (source)
  • As he took his hands from the pillow he heard a long slow sigh go up from the bed into the air of the darkened room, a sigh which afterwards, when he remembered it, seemed final, irrevocable.†   (source)
  • He seems to have already a foreknowledge of something now irrevocable, not to be recalled, who had believed that out here at the mill alone on Saturday afternoon he would be where the chance to do hurt or harm could not have found him.†   (source)
  • Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.†   (source)
  • One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions.†   (source)
  • But, all things considered, even this luxury was forbidden me; I was caught in the rattrap irrevocably.†   (source)
  • Everything now seemed irrevocable; the sentry passed back and forth outside the door, and in the courtyard among the hammocks the ceaseless murmur of sleep went on.†   (source)
  • Although it was no part of his constitutional function, Lincoln did what he could to speed this amendment toward ratification by announcing that he considered it only an explicit statement of what was already implicit in the Con-stitution—"I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable."†   (source)
  • A faint though guarded deference mitigated somewhat the irrevocable quality with which his voice always bound his words.†   (source)
  • You, talking of marriage, a wedding, here?' and Henry—the despair now, the last bitter cry of irrevocable undefeat: 'Yes.†   (source)
  • Eugene thought of this young Jew years later with the old piercing shame, with the riving pain by which a man recalls the irrevocable moment of some cowardly or dishonorable act.†   (source)
  • And then, once you've irrevocably made up your mind, does that mean you don't sweat and fear you can be wrong?†   (source)
  • This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self.†   (source)
  • All the things which he might have done for the poor creature, but which it was now too late to do, and all the shameful questions about responsibility which go with the irrevocable, united in his mind.†   (source)
  • But it is only my body—this elderly man here whom you call Bernard—that is fixed irrevocably—so I desire to believe.†   (source)
  • Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.†   (source)
  • His fear was that Brown might learn about the woman in the house and do something irrevocable out of his own unpredictable folly.†   (source)
  • Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one's pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity.†   (source)
  • I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.†   (source)
  • He said that every civilization has its one basic principle, one single, supreme, determining conception, and every endeavor of men within that civilization is true, unconsciously and irrevocably, to that one principle….†   (source)
  • And Eliza, stripped suddenly of her pretenses, clung to him, burying her white face in his coat sleeve, weeping bitterly, helplessly, grievously, for the sad waste of the irrevocable years— the immortal hours of love that might never be relived, the great evil of forgetfulness and indifference that could never be righted now.†   (source)
  • She seemed to see her whole past life, the starved years, like a gray tunnel, at the far and irrevocable end of which, as unfading as a reproach, her naked breast of three short years ago ached as though in agony, virgin and crucified; "Not yet, dear God.†   (source)
  • For a while yet she looks at him, without reproach, without anything at all, as if her eyes alone are listening to the irrevocable cessation of his voice.†   (source)
  • Thank God', not for the incest of course but because at last they were going to do something, at last he could be something even though that something was the irrevocable repudiation of the old heredity and training and the acceptance of eternal damnation.†   (source)
  • Somehow the very sound of the two words with their evocation secret and irrevocable and something of a hidden and unsleeping and omnipotent eye watching the doings of men, began to reassure Grimm's men in their own makebelieve.†   (source)
  • …was not anything except calm, who to him did not even have a name yet who was somehow so closely related to him as to be the owner of the one spot on earth where he had ever seen his mother weep; —returned, crossed that strange threshold, that irrevocable demarcation, not led, not dragged, but driven and herded by that stern implacable presence, into that gaunt and barren household where his very silken remaining clothes, his delicate shirt and stockings and shoes which still remained…†   (source)
  • I'm not ready to pray yet," she said aloud, quietly, rigid, soundless, her eyes wide open, while the moon poured and poured into the window, filling the room with something cold and irrevocable and wild with regret.†   (source)
  • It was a pervading everywhere of wistaria (I was fourteen then) as though of all springs yet to capitulate condensed into one spring, one summer the spring and summertime which is every females who breathed above dust, beholden of all betrayed springs held over from all irrevocable time, repercussed, bloomed again.†   (source)
  • I mean, because she did not worry about what to say, about plausibility or the possibility of incredulity on his part: that somewhere, somehow, in the shape or presence or whatever of that old outcast minister was a sanctuary which would be inviolable not only to officers and mobs, but to the very irrevocable past; to whatever crimes had molded and shaped him and left him at last high and dry in a barred cell with the shape of an incipient executioner everywhere he looked.†   (source)
  • …there it was, he was, orphaned once more by the very situation to which and by which he was doomed—the two of them officer and man now but still watcher and watched, waiting for something but not knowing what, what act of fate, destiny, what irrevocable sentence of what Judge or Arbiter between them since nothing less would do, nothing halfway or reversible would seem to suffice—the officer, the lieutenant who possessed the slight and authorised advantage of being able to say You go…†   (source)
  • Perhaps a man builds for his future in more ways than one, builds not only toward the body which will be his tomorrow or next year, but toward actions and the subsequent irrevocable courses of resultant action which his weak senses and intellect cannot foresee but which ten or twenty or thirty years from now he will take, will have to take in order to survive the act.†   (source)
  • …instruments played crudely and amateurishly out of time to the tune itself) in that barren hall with its naked stair (that carpet gone too) rising into the dim upper hallway where an echo spoke which was not mine but rather that of the lost irrevocable might-have-been which haunts all houses, all enclosed walls erected by human bands, not for shelter, not for warmth, but to hide from the world's curious looking and seeing the dark turnings which the ancient young delusions of pride and…†   (source)
  • …Miss Rosa to look upon her sister as a woman who had vanished not only out of the family and the house but out of life too, into an edifice like Bluebeard's and there transmogrified into a mask looking back with passive and hopeless grief upon the irrevocable world, held there not in durance but in a kind of jeering suspension by a man (his face the same which Mr Coldfield now saw and had seen since that day when, with his future son-in-law for ostensible yokemate but actually whip, Mr…†   (source)
  • …doing anything but just thinking out loud at all) that the legal mind might perceive and clarify that initial mistake which he still insisted on, which he himself had not been able to find: 'I was faced with condoning a fact which had been foisted upon me without my knowledge during the process of building toward my design, which meant the absolute and irrevocable negation of the design; or in holding to my original plan for the design in pursuit of which I had incurred this negation.†   (source)
  • …by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.†   (source)
  • But I do; I have; it is irrevocable now; if you discern aught in this letter which smacks of humility, take it as coming not from the mother and certainly not from the son, but from the pen of one whose humble position as legal adviser and man of business to the above described lady and young gentleman, whose loyalty and gratitude toward one whose generosity has found him (I do not confess this; I proclaim it) in bread and meat and fire and shelter over a period long enough to have…†   (source)
  • …actually whip, Mr Coldfield's conscience had set the brakes and, surrendering even his share of the cargo, he and the son-in-law had parted) who had entered hers and her family's life before she was born with the abruptness of a tornado, done irrevocable and incalculable damage, and gone on—a grim mausoleum air of puritan righteousness and outraged female vindictiveness in which Miss Rosa's childhood (that aged and ancient and timeless absence of youth which consisted of a…†   (source)
  • …elected and the Alabama convention and the South began to draw out of the Union, and then there were two presidents in the United States and the telegraph brought the news about Charleston and Lincoln called out his army and it was done, irrevocable now, and Henry and Bon already decided to go without having to consult one another, who would have gone anyway even if they had never seen one another but certainly now, because after all you don't waste a war; —think how they must have…†   (source)
  • I can imagine him and Sutpen in the library that Christmas eve, the father and the brother, percussion and repercussion like a thunderclap and its echo and as close; the statement and the giving of the lie, the decision instantaneous and irrevocable between father and friend, between (so Henry must have believed) that where honor and love lay and this where blood and profit ran, even though at the instant of giving the lie he knew that it was the truth.†   (source)
  • The store was now just a shell, the deserted building vacated even by rats and containing nothing, not even goodwill since he had irrevocably estranged himself from neighbors town and embattled land all three by his behavior.†   (source)
  • …day better clothes than he or his father and sisters had ever owned and ever expected to, who did nothing else but fan him and bring him drinks; and he (he was eleven or twelve or thirteen now because this was where he realised that he had irrevocably lost count of his age) lying there all afternoon while the sisters would come from time to time to the door of the cabin two miles away and scream at him for wood or water, watching that man who not only had shoes in the summertime too,…†   (source)
  • …which husbands and fiances have been trying to invent for ten million years: the thing that without harming her or giving her grounds for civil or tribal action would not only blast the little dream-woman out of the dovecote but leave her irrevocably husbanded (and himself, husband or fiance, already safely cuckolded before she can draw breath) with the abstract carcass of outrage and revenge; who said it and was free now, forever more now of threat or meddling from anyone since he…†   (source)
  • …how much, Sutpen had told Henry, and Henry not telling him, doubtless with the new mare which he probably knew he would have to surrender, sacrifice too, along with all the rest of his life, inheritance, going fast now and his back rigid and irrevocably turned upon the house, his birthplace and all the familiar scenes of his childhood and youth which he had repudiated for the sake of that friend with whom, despite the sacrifice which he had just made out of love and loyalty, he still…†   (source)
  • First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.†   (source)
  • It is an irrevocable vow that I want to take.†   (source)
  • But Aunt Juley was gone—gone irrevocably, and no power on earth could stop her.†   (source)
  • But he had decided, and it was irrevocable.†   (source)
  • And that touching of hands, she knew, would give that woman an irrevocable claim—to be seduced.†   (source)
  • The general and Totski had agreed to avoid any hasty and irrevocable step.†   (source)
  • He had to make a decision, irrevocable, perhaps perilous.†   (source)
  • I how it reminded me of the irrevocable past—Prince Muishkin, I believe?†   (source)
  • I mean that it was irrevocably feminine, even in father's time.†   (source)
  • The silence that followed lay on them with the weight of things final and irrevocable.†   (source)
  • Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.†   (source)
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