Citations:palimpsest

Noun

 * 1880, Henry Wadworth Longfellow, Night
 * The better life begins; the world no more Molests us; all its records we erase From the dull common-place book of our lives, That like a palimpsest is written o'er With trivial incidents of time and place,


 * 1949, George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (p35)
 * All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.


 * 1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
 * …their lips were palimpsests of secret flesh, scarred and unnaturally white, by which they all knew each other.


 * 1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
 * …hand and chalk poised in winter gloom over these poor human palimpsests shivering under their government blankets…


 * 1998, Susan Friedman, "Theorizing Cultural Hybridity"
 * Stressing historically produced hybridity, others emphasize how the mingling of different cultures and the formation of new ones takes place over time, constituting a temporal palimpsest of sedimentations.


 * 2002, Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions
 * My skin had become a palimpsest of fleeting sensations, and each layer bore the imprint of who I was.


 * 2005, Patrick Radden Keefe, Chatter
 * Miraculously, the Stasi's record of Garton Ash's years in Berlin remained intact, and in his extraordinary book The File he recalls going back to Berlin, sifting through the material, and piecing together those years for himself. The result is a palimpsest of memories, observations recorded by informants and agents, and the recollections in his own diaries at that time.


 * 2006, Cory Doctorow, "Correcting the Record: Wikipedia vs The Register"
 * Wikipedia’s History and Discuss pages are palimpsests recording the process by which the truth was eventually negotiated.