All 9 Uses of
mutilate
in
A Prayer for Owen Meany
- I was quite upset at how my best friend could have done this to me, until Dan Needham informed me that this was precisely what Owen felt he had done to me, and to himself: that we were both maimed and mutilated by what had happened to us.†
p. 88.9mutilated = severely injured or damaged
- But the creche's most ominous message was that the little Lord Jesus himself was missing; the crib was empty—that was why the Virgin Mary had turned her mutilated face away; why one angel dashed its harp, and another screamed in anguish; why Joseph had lost a hand, and the cow a leg.†
p. 187.5
- She was a girl who believed in the supernatural, in what she was always calling "signs"—for example, the rather commonplace mutilation and murder of a robin by one of the Front Street cats; to witness this torture was "a sure sign" you would be involved with an even greater violence yet to come.†
p. 193.6mutilation = severe injury or damage
- We even slaughtered toads and indelicately placed their mutilated bodies in the holy goalie's upturned palms, staining her with amphibian gore.†
p. 276.5mutilated = severely injured or damaged
- He described his mutilations in a self-condemnatory, regretful tone; although he also confessed his slight vandalism of the sainted Mary Magdalene, I was amused to see that he offered no apologies to the nuns of St. Michael's—it was the tadpoles and toads he was sorry about.†
p. 295.9
- Owen and I were nineteen-year-old seniors at Gravesend Academy— at least a year older than the other members of our class—when Owen told me, point-blank, what he had expressed to me, symbolically, when he was eleven and had mutilated my armadillo.†
p. 343.1mutilated = severely injured or damaged
- We were both anxious for Owen, and agitated—not knowing how his presentation of the mutilated Mary Magdalene might make his dismissal from the academy appear more justified than it was; we were worried how his desecration of the statue of a saint might give those colleges and universities that were sure to accept him a certain reluctance.†
p. 410.9
- Headmaster White and Chief Ben Pike were all for "throwing the book" at Owen Meany for the theft and mutilation of Mary Magdalene.†
p. 417.4mutilation = severe injury or damage
- My finger is a perfect fit; we handicapped people must learn to make the best of our mutilations and disfigurements.†
p. 520.3 *
Definition:
severely injure or damage -- for example by cutting up